I have written many times here that it is important to me that I control the platform that I publish on. I use the open-source WordPress software for my content management system and run that on a hosted server. I use my own domain, AVC.com, to locate my writings on the Internet. That has served me well. No matter how horrible I become, nobody is going to take me down.

But we can go even further down this path of controlling our destiny. We can decentralize the entire thing; the content management system, the storage of the content, the domain name system.

That is what Mirror is all about. Last week, I competed in the “race” to get the right to have a blog on Mirror. And I came in 10th place, just enough support to get in.

As a start, I am going to mirror this blog on Mirror and you will be able to read it at AVC.mirror.xyz. I have secured AVC.xyz and will eventually move my Mirror blog to that domain.

Is it possible that I will retire AVC.com and move entirely to AVC.xyz? Yes. But I am a fan of one step at a time. So for now, nothing will change.

Except that my content will start appearing on the decentralized web at AVC.mirror.xyz (eventually AVC.xyz). Which is a big deal in my view.

There are these news moments that we remember vividly forever. The plane flying into the World Trade Center. The mob breaking into the Capitol. Reagan at the Berlin Wall. Just writing the words, I can see the images in my head.

Our portfolio company Recount Media is all about these moments. Recount captures them quickly and concisely and shares them on social media and other digital platforms so that the world can see what is going on around them.

Today, they are trying an experiment that I am quite interested in. They have taken one of their most-viewed news moments, one they published exactly one year ago today, and they have minted it into a one-of-a-kind digital news moment and are offering anyone the opportunity to own it.

The auction is going on here and I just placed a bid. My goal is not to win this auction, although it is possible that I could. If I do, I will contribute it to a DAO that would allow group ownership.

Recount explains why they are experimenting with NFTs here. I particularly like this line:

So as we approached the one-year anniversary of the Calendar, our first runaway viral video, we thought it would be fun to celebrate that breakthrough in a manner that itself is an expression of our relentless aspiration to rethink how journalism works — its form, function, and economics — in this moment of intense fluidity and flux in digital media.

One of the challenges with digital media is the limited business models available to news organizations. You either sell ads or subscriptions, or both.

Who knows whether minting news moments can help stimulate new business models, but it sure can’t hurt to try. Sticking to the old ways of sharing the news and making a business out of it is not interesting to me. Coming up with new ways of sharing the news and making a business out of it very much is.

I guess the theme of this week is taxes. But today’s post is about something completely different. A Company wants to collect and remit taxes to NYS and NYC and lawmakers don’t want the money. I’ve written about this sad tale before but the story continues.

Back in February, NYS Governor Cuomo put a provision into the NYS budget that would allow/require Airbnb to collect NYS and NYC applicable taxes when Airbnb hosts collect revenues from their tenants.

If NYS and NYC were able to fully collect taxes on these Airbnb stays, it is estimated that a total of $130mm would be generated in new revenues; $75mm to NYC, $45mm to NYS, and about $10mm to various other counties in NYS.

Given that the NYS State Legislature wants to raise around $7bn in new tax revenues in this budget session, you would think tapping into this source of tax revenues would be a slam dunk.

But no. NYS legislators who are friends to the hotel industry and sworn enemies of Airbnb have pushed for the removal of this provision and it is likely to be out of the final budget.

It is time for everyone to grow up, recognize that Airbnb is never going away, treat them like the important service provider (to hosts and guests) that they are, and tax this process appropriately. I encourage NYS legislators to do that in this current session. The budget issues are too important to play silly politics anymore.

Most of our family’s income comes in the form of capital gains. And most of that comes in the form of carried interest on capital gains. Carried interest means the share of the profits that the managers of VC funds get (and PE funds and Hedge funds too).

For many years, there have been attempts to tax carried interest as ordinary income and those efforts have been fought tenaciously and successfully by the VC, PE, and Hedge Fund industries.

As far back as 2007, before USV had paid any carried interest to me, I wrote on this blog that I did not believe that carried interest deserved capital gains treatment and that, in my view, it was a fee and should be taxed as ordinary income.

I re-asserted that view in 2010, just as USV started to pay carry to me and my partners. My partner Albert also stated his views on the topic that same year.

But after thinking long and hard about this topic over the years, I have come to a slightly different and simpler perspective, one that I wrote about on labor day last year.

I think it would be better policy to lower the income tax rate and raise the capital gains rate to something like 20% so that all income is taxed equally no matter how it is achieved and so they the net impact on revenues is neutral.

https://avc.com/2020/09/honoring-labor/

If we taxed all income at the same rate, regardless of how it was earned, then we would not need to worry about the carried interest loophole and all other loopholes. We would have a simpler and fairer tax code.

I have read that Yellen and Biden are thinking of making some changes to the tax code to increase capital gains rates. I am fine with that. But I think they ought to lower rates on ordinary income at the same time. Get everyone on the same rate. That’s the winning move in my view.

I am in Park City Utah right now so I checked to see what Kickstarter projects were near me and I found this cool carbon fiber guitar project right here in Park City and backed it this morning.

Email readers can see the video here.

I have been interested in the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) since first hearing about it from my partner Albert years ago. I’ve mentioned it on and off here at AVC a bunch since then.

NYC will get its own UBI experiment if front-runner Andrew Yang is elected Mayor. Yang proposes to spend $1bn a year (out of an almost $90bn annual budget) providing $2k a year to 500k of NYC’s neediest citizens.

The theory of UBI is that giving people direct cash payments is more efficient and more effective than providing services to them via third parties. For example, if giving someone $2k a year keeps them in their apartment, the cost of operating homeless shelters and other housing for the homeless goes down. There are many more examples.

Skeptics of UBI point to the welfare system of the “Great Society” and other efforts to suggest that it won’t work and can’t work. They believe it will lead to idleness, drug use, gambling, and other societal ills.

So I read with interest of an experiment the city of Stockton CA did where they gave 125 randomly selected individuals making less than $46k a year a monthly stipend of $500.

The results are interesting. Researchers at the University of Tennessee and University of Pennsylvania concluded that this sample group saw many benefits including helping people get better jobs, better living situations, and better self worth. There was no evidence of increased drug use, gambling, joblessness, or any of the other concerns expressed by opponents of UBI.

I look forward to more experiments with UBI. One of the reasons that Andrew Yang’s candidacy for Mayor of NYC interests me is the opportunity to do a much larger experiment in a city that has a massive social infrastructure and lots of diversity. If UBI works in NYC, that will be very telling.

I keep reading that Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, etc are a climate issue.

It is true that proof of work mining which secures the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains uses electricity to do that work. And certainly there are carbon emissions associated with that electricity consumption.

However, it is not as simple as that for the following reasons:

1/ Proof of work miners are constantly seeking the lowest cost of electricity to mine with. That leads them to electricity sources like geo, hydro, solar, and wind. There is a meaningful financial incentive to mine on clean energy in many cases.

2/ The Ethereum blockchain is moving to proof of stake and moving away from proof of work. Many other popular blockchains, like the Flow blockchain that powers NBA Top Shot and other NFT experiences, already use proof of stake. Proof of stake consensus uses vastly less electricity to secure the network.

3/ There is a narrative that much of China’s Bitcoin mining happens on coal powered electricity, but I have read that most of it happens on China’s overbuilt hydro capacity.

4/ Proof of work mining can stimulate the buildout of clean energy capacity because it can produce immediate monetization of that capacity.

It is time for the crypto industry to study this issue carefully and provide real data. I would like to see carbon emissions from proof of work mining measured over time and projected into the future.

With vaccinations topping 90mm doses in the US and upwards of 75mm doses likely to be injected into arms in the US in March, many companies are starting to think about what a return to the office might look like this summer and fall.

I read two great posts this weekend talking about what this all means for knowledge workers and the companies that employ them:

Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future – Anne Helen Petersen

We’re Never Going Back – Packy McCormick

They both reference the writing of Dror Poleg on this topic so I will link to his blog as well.

What Anne and Packy are writing about is the future of our work spaces and whether our employers will require us to come back to the office full-time or will something else emerge.

Anne opens her post explaining that while the pandemic has proven that knowledge work does not need to be done in an office filled with all of our co-workers, what we have been doing in the last year is not what we will likely be doing in the future. As she observes, we have simply been working from our homes in the last year and that is not necessarily the future.

Packy asserts that employers don’t really have control over the decision of where we will all work going forward, employees do. The war for talent will determine where all of this lands.

Both are extremely thoughtful posts. I have been thinking about this topic for the better part of a year, for USV and for the 150 portfolio companies that we have invested in and advise. Anne and Packy’s thoughts line up pretty cleanly with mine. I think the change in venue for knowledge work is likely to be one of the biggest changes that we will see this decade.

Last summer, the Gotham Gal and I decided to make a co-working space where people living in the Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy neigborhoods in Brooklyn could work when they don’t want to go to the office but also don’t want to work from their kitchen or bedroom. We call it FrameWork and it will be opening next month. The tagline is “Your Home Office Away From Home.” We are very excited by the possibility that many more people will work most of the time in the neighborhoods that they live in and commutes will be an occasional thing versus an everyday thing. I think the quality of life improvements and the quality of neighborhood improvements that will emerge from this will be dramatic.

FrameWork is just an example of the many ways that knowledge workers will choose to work going forward. I expect the innovation around work spaces will be fast and furious once we can actually start working somewhere other than our home. And I expect that to start to happen in the second quarter of this year as I explained in my Jan 1st 2021 blog post.

So if you are an employer, what do you do? This suggestion by Packy is interesting:

instead of mandating a certain number of days in-office, companies should view employees as customers who they need to convince to come in with a great product:

Re-design the office to facilitate things that employees can’t do at home: whiteboard rooms, podcast and video recording studios, screening rooms, maker tools, etc… 

Take less space on more flexible terms in order to adapt and evolve as employees’ needs do.

Make the office feel more like a social club, with more focus on spaces for employees to share meals, have spontaneous conversations, and take in work-related programming. 

Hire hospitality and flexible operators to help them figure it out. Alma does hybrid work/social well, so Carlström set up Another Structure to bring that expertise to companies that want to build the right spaces for this new world. 

Infuse the space with technology to facilitate communication and collaboration with remote employees. 

https://www.notboring.co/p/were-never-going-back

But it is this observation by Anne that I think is maybe the most powerful of all:

The idea of “boundaries” has become so porous when it comes to cultivating work/life balance that it’s lost all meaning. People don’t respect boundaries. You don’t respect them. Even when the pandemic is over, it’s going to be very, very difficult to try to rebuild them. What we actually need are guardrails, big and sturdy ones, to protect us from the runaway semi-truck of work.

In our current framework, boundaries are the individual’s responsibility, and when they’re broken, it’s because the individual failed to protect them. But guardrails? They’re there to protect everyone, and they’re maintained by the state, aka your company. There are a lot of ways to actually build guardrails around employee’s lives, and we discuss them at length in the book. But the larger shift has to be away from all of this worthless “personally-maintained boundaries” bullshit.

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/imagine-your-flexible-office-work

As Anne correctly points out, working from home has meant working non-stop for many of us. I am guilty of this and I feel it after a year of working this way. Employers will need to figure out how to constrain work hours for their employees because it turns out we can’t do that for ourselves. Office hours (9 to 5) did that for us. What will be the new office hours? We will need to figure that out.

We have the possibility to fundamentally change the way knowledge work is done and how we who do it experience it. The opportunities around this are almost endless and I am personally very excited by it.

My normal practice on Fridays is to post a Kickstarter project that I have backed that I think is interesting and that others might want to back.

But today, I want to talk about Kickstarter’s Watch Now on iTunes offering.

If you are like us and have watched so much TV during the pandemic that you are now struggling to find new things to watch, click on over to Watch Now and find amazing independent films that were funded on Kickstarter and are available to watch on iTunes.