We arrived in paradise (as this photo shows) last night and we will be here with our family and friends for the next ten days.
I plan to write daily but maybe not about tech and startups as much as I usually do.
It has been an eventful year and next one is shaping up to be a doozy. So I am looking forward to some time to relax and reflect and recover before things get crazy again.
Brian Armstrong, founder and CEO of USV portfolio company Coinbase, sat down with Coinbase Board Member Chris Dixon and talked about how Brian started Coinbase, how the company grew, and where crypto is today.
It’s about 40mins and it’s a great conversation to listen into.
I went onto Kickstarter today to find, fund, and then feature a project on my regular Funding Friday post. I found so many great projects that I backed all of them and I have listed them below. Check them out, they are all great. And back a few of them too if you are so inclined.
When Governor Cuomo and the state legislature passed last year’s budget, they formed a committee to address the growing crisis in the NYC metro area transportation systems. That committee was chaired by my longtime friend Kathy Wylde, who runs and has run the NYC Partnership for many years. Anyone who knows Kathy knows she is all business and does not mince words. The world could use more people like Kathy, particularly in public service.
The committee released their report this week and you can read it here. The NY Times also covered the release of the report here.
The bottom line is that the MTA which controls much of the transit and tunnel and bridge infrastructure for the NYC metro area transit system needs between $45bn and $60bn over the 2020-2024 five year capital planning window. That compares to $33bn over the prior five year period from 2015-2019.
How does the city and state and region come with up to $60bn? Well, one of the ideas is to implement congestion pricing in the “central business district” in Manhattan. That is an idea that has been proposed a number of times over the years, most notably by Mayor Bloomberg during his tenure. It is a good idea and long overdue. A dense urban environment should have excellent mass transit and incentives to use it and should have disincentives to drive cars. Taxing cars in Manhattan and using the revenues to maintain and improve our subways seems like an obvious thing to do.
Congestion pricing in the central business district in Manhattan should produce upwards of $1bn a year in new revenues. If a surcharge was applied to “for hire vehicles” (taxis, Uber, Lyft, etc) in the same central business district, another $400mm a year could be generated.
If you bonded the $1bn, that could produce $15bn. If you bonded the for hire vehicle surcharge, that could produce another $9bn. Those are big numbers and would go a long way to funding the 2020-2024 capital plans.
But as Bliss McCrum, who taught me much about venture capital and recently passed away, would say “don’t put good money after bad without first making some changes.”
And the changes Bliss was talking about was the team, the operating model, and the strategy.
So the other recommendations from the committee should be taken seriously before fully funding the 2020-2024 plan. Breaking up the MTA is at the top of the list. It is a monstrous bureaucracy which is wasteful and badly mismanaged. If it were a privately held company, it would have been bankrupt and reorganized long ago. We should treat it as bankrupt and reorganize it now.
There is very little that can’t be fixed by good management, a business minded operating model, and a responsible investment plan. Unfortunately government is not rich with any of those. But our transportation systems should be and those in government can and should make that a priority. Nothing less than the future of our city is at stake.
USV is an investor in Multicoin Capital, one of the leading token funds. In late October I attended their Multicoin Summit and spent about 45mins on stage with Tushar Jain, one of the two managing partners at Multicoin.
It’s a pretty good
With the news of Google and Amazon’s huge expansions into NYC, many people are asking “how did NYC tech get to this place?” Well, I am going to post a
But first, I’d like to talk about how I ended up doing that history lesson, which in and of itself is a history lesson.
When the Internet sector started to emerge from its nuclear winter in the late 2003/early 2004 (which is also when Brad Burnham and I went out and raised the first USV fund), those of us who were still working in the
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle came up with it. They called the re-emergence of the Internet/web sector “Web 2.0” and they launched a conference called Web 2.0
By 2008, it was clear that NYC was increasingly an important part of the Web 2.0 story, by virtue of companies like Etsy, Tumblr, Delicious, and other important “web 2” companies started in NYC (and funded by USV).
So John and Tim decided to host a Web 2.0 Summit in NYC in 2008 and to celebrate that, they asked me to give a history lesson in the emergence of tech in NYC in the mid 90s. I did that and it remains one of my favorite talks I have given.
Here it is. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed doing it.
Our portfolio company SoundCloud just launched a pretty cool thing. If you are a DJ and use one of the popular DJ software products, you can plug SoundCloud into it and make your mixes right from the cloud.
Here’s a 15 second video advertisement for this new feature:
SoundCloud has announced that this feature is coming to all of the popular DJ software products soon.
It is great to see SoundCloud, a company that got its start with DJs, bringing all that it has built over the years back to it early users.
I believe that negotiating is more of an art than a science. There are certainly strategies and skills that one can develop that make for better outcomes.
But the art comes into play in figuring out what the person or people on the other side are optimizing for and adopting a strategy that reflects that.
I have found that a single style and strategy rarely works well for every situation.
Let’s take the important question of whether you should make a “take it or leave it” offer and then draw a hard line on that offer or whether you should make an offer that has a fair bit of negotiating cushion in it.
Some people like to negotiate and expect to negotiate. If you make a hard line offer and refuse to negotiate with them, they will be frustrated with you and may seek out other offers. Or if they do end up transacting with you, they will feel burned by the negotiating process and you will be starting off the relationship on the wrong foot
If you make an offer that has a lot of room for negotiating, they may actually enjoy the experience and come away feeling like they got a good deal from you.
I like to shake hands at the end of a negotiation with both parties pleased with where they ended up. That is particularly important when you are entering a long term relationship like a venture capital investment.
It is also critical to know what your “must haves” are going into a negotiation and what you can give on.
Another form of negotiating art is how you reveal your must haves and where you are flexible. I have found that it is not helpful to a negotiation to lay all of that out at the start. There is a lot of value in a discovery process. It is a bit like dating. Each side reveals a bit about themselves to the other and that is also very helpful at the start of what might be a long relationship.
All that said, there are times when drawing a hard line is appropriate. If the other side has all of the leverage then it is often best to make your best offer and say take it or leave it. If, for example, the other side has used a process to drive price discovery and possibly discovery around other key terms and has multiple offers, you are not going to win the deal with the low ball offer with negotiating room. You have to give it your best shot and then walk if you can’t win on that basis.
Like most art, it takes some time to learn all of this. You can take a class or a workshop on negotiating tactics and learn the fundamentals. I would strongly recommend that for young folks just getting started in business.
But when it comes to learning how to size up the other party, well that takes time. You have to mess up some negotiations, lose some deals, and possibly win some on terms you later regret.
It is that last bit, living with the terms you negotiate, where the greatest learnings come. I have found that a very powerful argument in a difficult negotiation is when you say “I did that once, I deeply regret it, and I’m never doing it again.”
I loved this A16Z podcast featuring Adrienne Mayor who recently authored “Gods & Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology“. Early in this
I don’t really use Waze that much. My trips are typically a combo of walking, biking, subways, and driving and Google Maps does a great job of offering all of those options. Waze is made for driving. So I am more of a Google Maps user than a Waze user.
But Waze has one feature that I am increasingly addicted to: the “plan a trip” later feature.
I am going to Brooklyn this morning for a Board Meeting and then I need to be in my office later. So I pulled out my phone, launched Waze, and figured out when I need to leave by (if I am going by car).
It looks like this:
Given that Google (which owns Waze) has this data, I would love to see Google add this feature to Maps and apply it to
I would also like Google to add this data to
Imagine if this feature was available in Resy and Open
We are living in a time when our phones and the services we use know so much about us and the world around us. That is problematic and getting more so. But it is also true that can offer magical experiences that makes our lives so much better. This plan a trip feature and other places it can be applied is an example of the latter.
