Parenting is the hardest and greatest job that I have had.

It presents the thorniest problems and generates the greatest rewards.

We had the pleasure of spending most of yesterday with our three kids and their significant others.

The occasion was our oldest daughter’s masters thesis presentation at her MFA program.

She is an artist who works with computer generated imagery and animation.

The work she made for her thesis was a five to seven minute animation loop and I probably watched it five or six times yesterday afternoon.

It was the first time I had seen it and I was amazed at its beauty, its quality, and the emotions it conveyed.

Needless to say, I am proud of her and also all of the other artists that showed their work alongside her.

We then spent the rest of the afternoon with our other kids hanging out and having fun with them.

Then we all got together for a late (for me) dinner that was celebratory and fun.

As the dinner ended, I sided up next to The Gotham Gal, put my arm around her, and said “that was a good parenting day.”

She looked at me and smiled.

I have loved all of parenting; rocking them to bed, the late feedings, changing the diapers, teaching them things, family vacations, the teenage years, leaving home, the college years, and the early adult years.

As I write those things, I also recall the challenges of each of them and the moments where we did not know what to do in certain situations.

But we figured it out and got through it and moved on to the next stage.

We certainly got better at it over time but we have never felt that we have parenting figured out.

Now we are in the phase where our kids are adults and accomplishing things that amaze and impress us.

They understand things we don’t understand, they do things we can’t do, and they are having successes that we have little part in.

That makes me feel so good.

I don’t believe our work is done. I believe we will be parenting for as long as we live.

But I do believe that the work is easier and the gains are richer.

But most of all I am reminded that our best work is done at home and the fruits of it are measured in joy.

AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything.” I have noticed a trend of CEOs doing these AMAs for their customers and broader stakeholder communities.

A good example of a CEO who is doing this is Brian Armstrong, CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase.

Brian has been doing this for several months. You can see all of them on their YouTube channel.

Here is the one he did with LJ Brock, Coinbase’s Chief People Officer, yesterday.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a reader. She asked if he could subscribe to this blog without the funding friday posts. He thought they were “spammy.” I replied to him “think about them as the ads” and politely told him that wasn’t possible.

I love funding things. And I love sharing the things I fund with all of you.

I saw this project this morning and backed it instantly. A musical art project. Awesome.

While society debates how to deal with climate change, there are some scientists who are now saying that that time has passed and we now need to start planning society’s adaptation to the climate tragedy we have created on planet earth.

This scientific paper from roughly one year ago is super depressing. I am linking to it because I read it this week and it certainly made me consider how our way of life may change dramatically in my lifetime.

I am not yet ready to throw in the towel on our ability to react to the mounting evidence of a rapidly warming planet and dramatically slow it down with actions like the Paris Accords, recent laws in New York City and New York State, and everyone’s personal actions in what we do and how we do it.

And there is no benefit in getting depressed or defeatist about the climate change threat.

I think the opposite is true. It is time to stop debating whether the planet is warming. It is even time to stop debating about who is going to pay for the massive investments we need to make immediately to slow that warming. It is time to start making them.

We seed funded a company late last year called Abridge and the company went public yesterday with their iOS and Android apps. Naomi wrote about the investment on the USV blog.

I want to focus on the product because I think it is a game changer for all of us that access the health care system regularly.

The Abridge mobile app (get it here) allows anyone to record a medical visit with a doctor, a nurse, or any other health care professional.

It works like this:

You open the app to see your visit history:

You tell the doctor, nurse, etc that you are going to record the session and hit the record button:

Then you record the session.

When you are done Abridge saves the audio recording of the session and also immediately (in way less than a minute) provides a transcript of the session with the key medical terms called out in bold.

That is me making stuff up this morning. I sure hope I don’t need a knee replacement any time soon.

This is one of those ideas that is so simple and so obvious that you wonder why nobody has done it before.

The team is a combination of physicians and machine learning people from University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. It’s a combination of domain experts and technologists who are extremely well suited to make this work and work simply and elegantly.

I would encourage everyone who sees doctors regularly or has a loved one that does to get Abridge on your phones and their phones.

I think it’s a game changer for how we access and understand the medicine in our lives.

I was sitting in my backyard this weekend looking up at the roof on my house, which I can’t see because of a parapet, and wondering how all of the solar panels we put up there a few years ago are doing. I was also wondering how the roof itself is doing.

Then it hit me that USV has a portfolio company that can help. I went to my Dronebase account and ordered a drone mission that will do an aerial inspection of my roof and also a thermal inspection of our solar panels.

Yes, one drone pilot with an off the shelf drone can do all of that for me in less than an hour.

I scheduled the flight for next week and should have a full report with aerial imagery and video and thermal scans of the solar panels within a few days after that.

And I am going to get all of that for a less than it costs me to keep my pool serviced!!

But it gets better. Today, Dronebase is announcing that it has acquired the Drone Reports business from Betterview and will turn that into a new product line called Dronebase Insights.

From that blog post:

DroneBase Insights aims to help insurers and property managers assess damage and mitigate risk for commercial properties, and we’ll expand our offering over time

So now you can get a full blown report from Dronebase in addition to aerial imagery and video and thermal scans.

I didn’t order that myself this weekend but maybe I should have. I probably will next time.

It is ironic and upsetting that a nation built on immigration is increasingly unwelcoming to immigrants and that the words ” go back” are becoming a political rallying cry.

I am for immigration full stop.

I think opening our arms and borders to people who want to come here, work, build their lives and businesses and futures makes our country stronger.

It always has. Nothing that is great about the United States was accomplished without immigrants.

Immigrants built our docks, they built our railroads, they built our automotive industry, and they built our technology industry.

If we were to close our borders completely, I believe we would be a second rate country within a couple of generations.

Immigration is new blood, new ideas, a work ethic, a belief in a better future, a willingness to take enormous risk, burn the boats, and get it done.

We need that in our society. We will die without it.

I have been vocal here that I do not like the term Unicorn to describe highly valued venture-backed startups. Unicorns are mythical creatures that don’t really exist and highly valued venture-backed startups do exist. They might be rare, but they are not fictional.

A better word would be Whales. And it turns out that the Whaling industry in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries looked remarkably similar to today’s venture capital business.

Some of my friends and colleagues have been texting and tweeting about a book called VC: An American History by Tom Nicholas. So I got it on my Kindle and the first chapter is all about the Whaling industry and its similarities to the VC business.

Here are some photos I took of the first chapter on my phone.

This is a chart that plots the distribution of returns by whaling voyage vs venture capital fund.

This is a diagram that compares the structure of the whaling industry to the venture capital industry.

And this is a chart that shows the performance of the top 29 whaling agents. This is very similar to charts I have seen that compares the performance of the top venture capital firms.

So while Unicorns are made up creatures, Whales are not. And given the similarities between a highly successful venture capital investment and a highly successful whaling voyage, I am going to start calling the big winners in the venture industry Whales. I hope it catches on.

Back in May, during Blockchain Week in NYC, I had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong.

We started off talking about their rapidly growing institutional business, but quickly got to talking about everything Coinbase.

Brian also gets a question in for me about 17mins into the talk.

It’s about 10 minutes of me asking Brian questions and then another 20 minutes of Q&A from the audience.