I just watched Vitalik Buterin’s keynote at Devcon 4 in Prague last week, on Halloween and on the tenth anniversary of Satoshi’s whitepaper.

In this keynote, Vitalik explains what has taken so long in getting from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0, what Ethereum 2.0 will include, and how we are going to get there.

It is a bit geeky, I can’t say that I understood everything, but if you own Ethereum, or if you believe that a scaled decentralized smart contract platform is important, and I can say yes to both of those emphatically, then this is worth watching. It is 30 mins long.

Earlier this week, I talked about the D2C consumer products sector and how it has exploded over the last decade. Another contributor to that explosion are crowdfunding services like our portfolio company Kickstarter that allow entrepreneurs to launch their products and quickly get feedback and funding for them.

The Gotham Gal has made a number of these D2C investments and one of my favorite of hers is Misen, a D2C manufacturer of cooking products.

They launch their products on Kickstarter and then take them to market direct to consumer over the Internet, thereby taking out the cost of the retail channel which allows them to sell high end products at mid-level prices.

They have a product launch on Kickstarter right now called the Misen Non-Stick Pan. I backed it earlier this week and the project funding ends this weekend.

Back in March of this year, I wrote a post on the USV blog announcing our investment in Cryptokitties. 

A lot has happened since then. The company that made Cryptokitties is now called Dapper and it has raised a couple rounds of financing which will allow it to do a number of things:

• Continue to invest in Cryptokitties, which remains a vibrant game experience and is the world’s most used consumer blockchain application outside of exchanges, with 3.2-million transactions and tens of millions of dollars transacted on the platform
• Work with the world’s top entertainment brands to bring compelling brands, communities, and intellectual property to the blockchain. This means more game experiences, often in partnership with existing brands and game developers.
• Build out the infrastructure to make blockchain games, including cryptogoods (ie NFTs), accessible to a mainstream audience.

It has been exciting to watch a small team that built Cryptokitties at a hackathon turn into a large and growing blockchain gaming company with global ambitions and a number of important launches on the horizon.

As I wrote in the USV post in March, we believe that “digital collectibles and all of the games they enable will be one of the first, if not the first, big consumer use cases for blockchain technologies.”

A lot is happening behind the scenes at Dapper, and at a number of other blockchain gaming companies, and increasingly in the legacy gaming sector, to give me confidence that 2019 will be a breakout year for blockchain gaming and I believe that our portfolio company Dapper will be leading the way.

One of the big trends in startup land over the last decade is consumer brands getting built direct to consumer (D2C) on highly efficient advertising channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In these online channels, brands can test, measure, test, measure, test, measure, and then figure out what works and scale.

But these channels are getting more challenging as they have been optimized and scaled by thousands of brands over the last decade and the marketers in D2C land are increasingly looking around to see if there is anywhere else they can go.

Enter our portfolio company Simulmedia, which we invested in almost ten years ago to bring the transparency and efficiency of online advertising to television.

Simulmedia has launched an offering for these D2C companies to help them add television to their marketing mix. Television is hard for small companies. The initial buys are large and it is challenging to “test, measure, test, measure, test, measure” to optimize before you scale.

So Simulmedia has brought D2CX market. 

D2Cx is a marketplace featuring over 135 national TV networks, making it easy for direct-to-consumer brands to test TV advertising at low entry prices, learn what’s working, and scale.

You can start for as little as $50k and 100% of the cost of the media will go towards the purchase of media.

If you want to try out D2CX for your company/product, you can learn more here and sign up to try it out.

The Partnership For New York City operates some excellent “vertical” accelerators for companies that are getting started and are focused on serving industries with big footprints here in NYC.

Financial Services – FinTech Innovation Lab

Health Care – Digital Health Innovation Lab

Fashion – Fashion Tech Lab

Biotech – The BioAccelerate Prize

Transit – Transit Tech Lab

Both the Transit Tech Lab and the FinTech Innovation Lab are accepting applications right now for their next programs.

You can apply here:

Fintech Innovation Lab

Transit Tech Lab

Consumer surplus is the delta between what consumers expect to pay or are willing to pay for an item and what they actually have to pay given market dynamics. A good example of where we are generating a lot of consumer surplus is technology. I would be happy to pay for my email (and do) but I can get it for free from Gmail. A 49″ smart TV sells for about $300 on Amazon. A Samsung Chromebook is $200 on Amazon.

I like to think of all of this “found money” that consumers are getting from technology as the dividend we are getting from the technology revolution. It is also true that technology takes jobs out of the market, and adds them too, and that it may be a zero sum game or worse.

But the truth is many things have gotten a LOT less expensive over the last twenty years and that has made managing the household budget a fair bit easier.

My colleague Nick sent me this chart yesterday. I don’t know where he got it so I can’t identify the source.

What you see from the chart is that wages have increased about 70% over the last twenty years and many things, including housing, food, clothing, and most dramatically technology, have increased less, or have actually gone down in price, creating room/surplus in the household budget.

But not everything has gone down. Health care and education, most notably have increased dramatically.

So it is time to take aim at those sectors. We can do the same with education that we have done with other services. And we will. I feel that healthcare will be a harder lift, but I do think it can be tackled too.

In fact, our current thesis at USV compels us to go after these sectors. So we will.

I am excited about the potential to bring consumer surplus to these sectors and make more room in the household budget in doing so.

This video is an advertisement in support of a group of women running for national office in these midterms.

I am compelled by this advertisement and these women. I am very hopeful that women like these will increasingly lead our congress and our country.

Our portfolio company Coinbase announced this week that they will be adding the USDC Stablecoin to their various services in the coming weeks. 

This video below explains what the USDC stablecoin is and why it is important.

Four years ago, filmmaker Torsten Hoffmann raised $AUS 17,000 on Kickstarter to make a documentary about Bitcoin called The End Of Money As We Know It. The film was released in July 2015 and I watched it and thought it was very good.

Torsten is back with a follow-up film project called Cryptopia and I backed it today.