If there is a technology that has overpromised and underdelivered more than AR/VR over the last five years, I am not sure what it is.

Facebook paid $2bn (or possibly more) for Oculus in the spring of 2014 and maybe a couple million Oculus headsets have been sold since then. And Facebook is reportedly continuing to spend billions more on Oculus.

So when is all of this investment going to pay off? Maybe sooner than people think.

Oculus Quest is a wireless (untethered) VR headset that shipped this spring and sells for $399 to $499 depending on how much memory you want.

In the past few weeks, a number of friends of mine have suggested I get a Quest (which I will do but have not yet done) and that I will be impressed by it.

I have long thought that an untethered headset that can deliver real VR experiences are what we need to unlock the VR market.

There aren’t many games or experiences for the Quest yet. Hopefully that will change soon.

Most technologies go through a cycle in which the promise is hyped up, followed by the reality setting in and going through a downturn. That has certainly been the case for AR/VR.

But it may well be that the technology is finally catching up to the promise in AR/VR. At least that is what the smartest people I know in this sector are telling me right now.

Being a Knicks fan teaches you a lot about disappointment. At one point this spring, we thought we were going to get a couple top free agents and the first pick in the draft. We ended up with a lot less.

Fortunately, I have learned a lot about disappointment in three decades of backing early-stage startups. Our business is one where a third of things we do don’t work out at all and another third deliver a lot less than we had hoped when we pulled the trigger. Only a third of our investments deliver on what we expected when we made them.

Fortunately about ten percent of the investments we make so vastly outperform our expectations, that they make up for everything else we do.

So we live with a lot of disappointment. And one of the questions I struggle with is how much of that disappointment do we share with the founders and teams we work with.

Certainly feedback helps founders. But if the feedback is too negative and too downbeat, it is not helpful and can also lead to tune-out.

So I have found that many times I need to bite my tongue and take the disappointment in stride and chalk it up to the cost of doing business in early-stage investing. You have to be an optimist to make early-stage investments and you can’t let the disappointments take that optimism out of you.

Which takes me back to the Knicks. It has been twenty years since the Knicks had a winning culture. That is a lot of losing to endure. But I keep buying the seasons tickets in hopes that things will change. I am going to stay positive and hope for the best.

Christopher Mims has a good post on the 5G headaches that are in store for those of us in the US as we roll out 5G:

The Downside of 5G: Overwhelmed Cities, Torn-Up Streets, a Decade Until Completion

As carriers launch their 5G networks, the promise of superfast wireless is clashing with the reality of the rollout; ‘the real onslaught has not yet begun’https://t.co/j4LXxxf7yv

— Christopher Mims 🎆 (@mims) June 29, 2019

While getting to wireless speeds that are close to the fastest wired speeds is important, it also begs the question why are we doing it this way.

Jessica Rosenworcel, who is one of the FCC Commissioners, explains why the US approach to 5G is different than elsewhere in this opinion piece:

Washington is choosing the wrong lane in the race to 5G.
Me in @WIRED: https://t.co/STobHUavBw

— Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) June 10, 2019

I was in a meeting earlier this year and there were some execs from the big wireless carriers in the room. They were complaining about how difficult local governments are being on the 5G rollout. I asked them if 5G is really going to work with this network architecture that requires so much infrastructure buildout. They were confident. I am not.

Juan Benet, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Protocol Labs, developer of the IPFS and Filecoin protocols, gave this talk last fall.

I like Juan’s statement, about 10mins into this talk, that “what Bitcoin did to money, Web3 does to everything.” That is obviously a very big statement/ambition, but I agree with it.

Here is Juan’s talk:

I backed this Kickstarter project earlier this week.

It has about one more day to go.

David Kelnar sent me this deck that he did on the state of AI. It is very good.

This slide got my attention:

It is interesting, and not totally surprising, that the sector that AI-focused entrepreneurs are targeting more than any other is health and wellbeing.

It seems like there is so much opportunity to improve our collective health and wellbeing with data science and machine learning. This is a big part of our thesis around healthcare at USV.

If you are feeling a little low on energy and want a pick me up, go to a high school graduation. You could simply crash any graduation, you don’t need to know anyone graduating. They are such feel good events.

I went to the AFSE graduation yesterday.

This is the fourth class that has graduated from AFSE and I think I have been able to attend every graduation. It really is such a great way to spend a couple of hours.

I like the procession music, I like the faces on the students as they walk in. It is a mix of apprehension, pride, and excitement.

I like the speeches by the students. I like the speeches by the teachers and school leaders.

I like the handing out of the diplomas.

I like the joyous hugs from proud family members after the ceremony is over.

There really is nothing quite like the sense of opportunity, promise, and achievement that pervades high school graduations. If you have an opportunity to attend one this week, I strongly recommend it.

The lawmakers in Albany have passed legislation known as the Climate and Community Protection Act (CCPA) and it is sitting on the Governor’s desk awaiting signature.

There is plenty of debate on whether CCPA is good policy or bad policy. All you need to do is Google “New York’s Climate and Community Protection Act” and read the NY Post (against) and the NY Daily News (for) and you will see the various sides of the debate.

What this bill does is commit New York State to some of the most agressive goals of any city, state, or region:

This is a legally binding legislative act to achieve an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a goal of net zero.

My view is that we need ambitious goals like this and penalties for not reaching them (the stick).

But we also need new policies and new funding/investment to allow us to reach them (the carrot).

Most of the “green new deal” style legislation that is getting passed in NYC, NYS, and elsewhere, and being proposed in many other places, is long on sticks and short on carrots.

I believe CCPA is a good first step for NYS and I hope the Governor signs it into law.

But legislators and activists and the business community should not stop there. We need to follow these goal setting/penalty setting laws with more work around how we get there and there are many good ideas floating around on how to do that.

As hard as if has been to get CCPA done, I think the hard work is just starting because reaching these goals will require creativity, innovation, new technology, and a massive amount of investment and the willpower to see it through.

We really don’t have a choice. So let’s go.

USV portfolio company goTenna‘s founder and CEO Daniela Perdomo and USV analyst Dani Grant did some number crunching on VC funding and published the info last week.

After 4 rounds of VC, I ran my own data analysis to see if my experience is unique. Women founders in female-focused sectors raise equitable VC, but women in non-female sectors raise 54% less than their fair share. In deep-tech, women raise up to 75% less! https://t.co/4Fvfor3DXD

— Daniela Perdomo (@danielaperdomo) June 18, 2019

The good news is that in business sectors where women are well represented in the customer set, women founders are raising more (on a pro-rata basis) than their male counterparts.

The bad news is in the rest of the business sectors, women founders raise a lot less (on a pro-rata basis) and in “deep tech” the numbers are particularly bad.

These conclusions ring true to me based on what I see in the market.

I believe women founders have made a lot of progress in the last decade in raising VC. There are many more of them approaching VC firms for capital and many more of them getting funded. But it seems most of the progress has been in sectors where women are well represented.

The progress in sectors where women are not as well represented is almost non-existent. We in the VC sector need to understand the conscious and unconscious biases at work when we meet with a women founder working in one of these under-represented sectors and fight them off.

Founders like Daniela, when they are successful, will help a lot. There is nothing like success to change people’s opinions, conscious and otherwise.