One of the things I love about Foursquare is the focus on tips. Not ratings, not reviews, but tips. It’s the power of the positive over the negative. Tips from friends are even better.

So this week, Foursquare (which is a USV portfolio company) rolled out something called Trip Tips. You go to Trip Tips, you say where you are going, and you tweet it out to your followers on Twitter or your friends on Facebook.

I am at LAX, headed to SF today. So I entered San Francisco into Trip Tips, like this:

And I got these share options:

I decided to tweet the trip tip out like this:

I’m going to San Francisco! Click here to recommend places for me to visit on Foursquare. https://t.co/7nuAH8fDsK #foursquare

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) January 27, 2016

My SF list is already filling up and the best part is its immediately available on my mobile phone in the Foursquare app lists tab (bottom left):

And here is the list as it stands (less than ten mins after my tweet!):

Give it a try with a trip you are planning to take soon. It’s a lot of fun.

AVC community member William Mougayar is seeking an advance to write two books about the blockchain and business. The first is called The Business Blockchain and the second is called Centerless. Instead of schelpping his work around to the various publishing houses seeking an advance, he’s gone directly to the crowd via Kickstarter. William is seeking an $18,000 advance to write and self publish these two books.

William is also going to syndicate drafts and excerpts of the book on Wattpad. You can follow him on Wattpad and get these writings delivered directly to your phone via the Wattpad app.

As the AVC’ers who hang out in the comments know, William has made himself an expert in the business of the blockchain over the past 2-3 years and is well suited to write these two books. I’ve kicked things off by backing his Kickstarter and I hope others here at AVC will join me in doing that.

I listen to tons of podcasts on SoundCloud. I follow them and they just come into my feed every day and I can listen on my phone in the SoundCloud app. It’s a great experience.

One of the podcasts I like is the Product Hunt Podcast. This weekend I listened to this podcast with Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe.

I enjoyed it and because I’ve been on a call since 5am this morning and don’t have time to write today, I am using this opportunity to post something useful on AVC today.

In the mid/late 90s, we had a venture capital firm called Flatiron Partners. Our primary investor was Chase Capital Partners (CCP) and for the first year of our existence we worked out of CCP’s offices in midtown manhattan. I learned a lot from the partners at CCP, they were experienced and disciplined private equity investors. One of the best of the group was Arnie Chavkin and he taught me something that I come back to often. Arnie told me “get the strategy right and the execution is easy.”

Up to that point, about ten years into my venture capital investing experience, I did not have enough appreciation for strategy. I came from the “work hard and surround yourself with smart people and you will succeed” school. That’s how I went about my job and that’s what I looked for in teams to back. But Arnie’s words got my attention. The idea that execution could be easy was tantalizing to me. And it made sense. If everyone knows what the company is trying to do, and what it is explicitly not trying to do, then they can be focused and efficient in their work. It also caused me to look at the companies that I worked with that were working really hard but not succeeding and I could see that many of them were not pursuing an intelligent strategy.

One of my favorite stories about getting the strategy right is TACODA, a company that Brad Burnham and I were angel investors in during the post bubble period in the early 2000s. TACODA made enterprise software for media companies that allowed them to understand their audience and serve more targeted ads to them. TACODA was one of the earliest, if not the first, behavioral targeting companies. TACODA was working extremely hard, with a very gifted and experienced team, and yet four years in, they were struggling to build a business. My partner Brad became obsessed with the strategy and go to market and told Dave Morgan, the founder and CEO, that he was “working too hard and getting nowhere” and encouraged him to rethink his strategy. Ultimately Dave decided to flip the go to market model to an ad network and within a year the business exploded and it sold a few years later to AOL for something like $275mm.

TACODA had the right idea, the right team, the right tech, but not the right strategy. When they fixed that, a ton of good things happened.

So if you are working really hard and have a strong team and aren’t getting where you want to go, take a hard look at your strategy. As Arnie told me, once you get that right the execution will be easy.

My partner Albert talked about the future of work at the DLD conference last week. Here’s the video of it.

My friend John Heilemann (Bloomberg Politics, Game Change, etc) and his friend Will Leitch (Deadspin, etc) have launched a podcast called Culture Caucus. They are going to talk about sports, television, film, and culture at large and its intersection with the body politic.

The first episode has two parts. The first part is about the changes in late night television shows, who is rising and who is falling, and how politicians think about going on these shows. I sat through the taping of this part and I found it fascinating. The second part features me talking about tech and Twitter.

It’s a long podcast, almost an hour in total. Here is the first episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can follow Culture Caucus on SoundCloud here.

What do you do if you are a crowdfunding service and one of your high profile projects fails to deliver leaving roughly 12,000 backers high and dry?

Well our portfolio company Kickstarter (where I am on the board) decided to shine a light on the failure by hiring an investigative reporter and giving him freedom to research and then tell the story of what went wrong without any interference by Kickstarter.

The journalist, Mark Harris, published his findings a few days ago. You can read the entire story here.

The project in question was called Zano and the idea was to build and ship a small autonomous drone. I am not going to summarize the story here on AVC. Those of you who want to read it should go read the entire piece. 

But I will say that the Zano story is a cautionary tale that anyone who backs projects on Kickstarer should read. Not every project works. In fact, it is shocking that something like 90% of projects funded on Kickstarter have eventually delivered although many are late.

Creative projects fail. Startups fail. Banks fail. Governments fail. Marriages fail. Failure is an important part of the human experience. I have personally failed more times than I want to remember. 

And so I hope that Kickstarter figures out a way to continue to shine a bright light on the big failures. They should not be swept under a rug. They should analyzed, discussed, and understood by the Kickstarter community and beyond. That is a very healthy thing.

It is political season in the US. For the next three months (ish) the two major political parties will select their nominees, then there will be a lull while the two nominees prepare for the general election which will kick off with the two conventions this summer and then it will be off to the races until election day in November. So for the next ten months the US will be in the throes of a Presidential election cycle. 

Its a good time to get all of issues on the table and debate them. One issue that I feel has not gotten enough air time yet and is fundamental to most everything is what is going on in the global economy (not just the US economy) and what that means for policy at home and abroad.

I saw a link to this post on Twitter today. I don’t know the author but it strikes me as directionally correct about the macro tends in the global economy. Here are some charts from it:

  
  
  
The author goes on to say:

The individual GDP share of the food, energy and healthcare industries of the total economy are larger than the ITC sector. What will the world look like if the total value of these would contract in similar fashion than we have had in ITC industry? Will we face an era of technological deflation? Most likely yes. Will it be a good or bad thing?

Deflation is a scary word. We have seen the Fed and other monetary bodies around the world print money for going on eight years to offset the effects of deflation and yet it feels like the deflationary pull is stronger today than ever.

It may be that the diverging lines in that first graph are going to continue to diverge no matter what we do from a policy perspective. The advancement of our technological capabilities may drive down the costs of living dramatically and also drive down the amount of human work that is required to produce and sustain our current quality of life.

This is a big deal. And yet we hear almost nothing about this in the current political debate. We hear old school jobs programs from the left and shrink the government and cut taxes from the right. 

We hear hawks talking about carpet bombing the middle east but no mention of what happens to that region if the world no longer needs their oil.

I don’t expect much from the political process because it hasn’t given us much other than some high quality entertainment value, which may be its core function in society right now. Which is a sad thought.

But if I were advising Hillary, or Bernie, or Cruz, or Rubio, or, god forbid, Trump, I would get their heads wrapped around these global macroeconomic trends and what they might mean ten, twenty, and thirty years out and suggest they start talking straight with the american public about them. Because they have the stage right now and they are the conversation starters and we have to start talking about this stuff.

AVC folks will know that my first foray into K-12 Computer Science Education work, which has now become almost a second full-time job, was the effort four years ago to open NYC’s first dedicated computer science high school. That high school is called The Academy For Software Engineering (AFSE) and this year they will graduate their first class. Here is Tylor Fields, AFSE’s first student to be accepted to college.

There will be many more college acceptances at AFSE over the course of the next few months. And a number of AFSE students will be going on to study computer science in college.

Students at AFSE receive 4 years of computer science courses, opportunities for internships and real work experiences, and 4 years of one-on-one mentoring with professionals in the tech community. 

In addition to graduating its first class this year (with a graduation rate in excess of 90%, which is off the charts for an unscreened high school in the NYC public school system), AFSE is also doing it’s first annual fundraiser this year.

The fundraiser is on February 3 from 7-10pm at Suite36 on 16 W. 36th Street. AFSE is seeking to raise $125,000 which will give the students in the Class of 2017 the following:  

• Each student is matched with a professional, college-educated mentor from iMentor for all 4 years of high school. This means an email each week, an in-person meeting each month,  and a go-to person for each phase of high school including completing college applications.
• Each student receives personalized college counseling through junior and senior years, as well as financial support for SAT/ACT exams, public and private college application fees, college visits and college deposits.
• Each student who is on track for high school graduation but not on track for college graduation is invited to participate in an intensive OneGoal course for the last two years of high school and first year of college.
• Each student has access to job shadowing, internships, and other work-based learning experiences to build their personal resumes and apply their learning in a real world context.

If you would like to buy a ticket to the event or donate to it, you can do so here.