Investing & Startups

I’ve spent the better part of the last six years thinking about where web standards come from.  Before joining USV, I was at the (now retired) urban tech incubator OpenPlans, where, among other things, we worked to further “open” technology solutions, including open data formats and web protocols. T...

Photo: Rudy (Loïs) Pignot I am in Paris this week for OuiShareFest, and spoke yesterday morning during the opening session.  OuiShareFest is in its third year as a large international gathering of folks interested in the peer/collaborative/sharing/networked society, put on by the community organizat...

I wrote earlier this week about how life is, generally, hard.  There’s no question about that. One of my favorite things about the Internet, and probably the most exciting thing about working in venture capital, is being around people who are working to re-architect the world to make hard things eas...

Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon at a US Patent & Trademark Office roundtable discussion on using crowdsourcing to improve the patent examination process.  Thanks to Chris Wong for looping me in and helping to organize the event.  If you’re interested, you can watch the whole video here. I wa...

My favorite book on product development and startups is Getting Real, published in 2006 by the folks at 37signals (now Basecamp).  If you haven’t read it (it’s freely available online), it’s essentially a precursor to The Lean Startup (2011). Back when I was leading a team and running product and Op...

I spent the last two days in meetings with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his staff, discussing their proposed Open Internet rules (aka net neutrality).  Monday’s meeting was with a group of NYC VCs, and Tuesday’s meeting was with group of NYC startup CEOs and GCs. Coming out of these meetings, and af...

Over the weekend, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sent a response to the letter that over 100 VCs and angel investors submitted last week.  In the letter, we stressed the importance of an open internet as a foundation for the stunning levels of investment and innovation we’ve seen in the internet applicati...

“It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.” — Joseph Stiglitz, In No One We Trust The week before last, I visited Yahoo! to give the keynote talk at their User First conference, which brought together big companies (Google, Facebook, etc), startups (big ones like USV portfolio com...

At USV, we talk a lot about how the landscape is changing, as more entrepreneurs and investors get behind the idea of building networks around problems, communities & verticals.  And that means that we are seeing more competitors in each space we look at, especially compared to what it looked like w...

There are at least two startups that I know of (Pave and Upstart) that facilitate VC-style equity investment in individuals.  Upstart describes this as “the startup is you”. In both cases, the idea is as follows: raise money from backers in exchange for a percentage of your future earnings.  The ide...

Yesterday I gave a talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum.  For those who don’t know it, PDF is a great event, and is now in its 10th year of bringing together the community of folks working at the intersection of tech, politics, and civics.  You can see all the talks from yesterday (and today...

I’ve been working on an internal web app for the past few weeks. I’m not a “real” programmer, so as usual I just figure things out as I go along and make lots of mistakes, but I always learn new stuff.  This is how I learned programming in the first place, got my first gigs… Continue reading

Today I’ve got a post up on the USV blog about Senator Chuck Schumer’s Patent Quality Improvement Act, and the problem of software patents and patent trolls in general. The PQIA would make it easier and cheaper to defend against frivolous patent infringement suits.  This isn’t everything we need to ...

Last night at USV, we hosted the latest of several recent meetups on the “Peer Economy”.  We are in the process of organizing a number of companies and organizations that represent a certain sector of the internet economy in NYC, with an eye towards building a more formal coalition (perhaps in the m...

The past three weeks have been really busy. First a trip to SF with the USV team, then to Austin for SXSW to put on We Heart Wifi, and finally to Iceland where we have been helping establish a new institute for internet policy at Reykjavik University. So as is typically the case, I have fallen… Cont...

This morning I am heading down to the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy to talk about Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0.  The pitch goes like this: “Peer Networks” are bringing new organizational and economic dynamics to every sector — unlocking tremendous opportunity and potential. ...

Today, we announced that USV is investing in Hailo.  I am psyched about this for a number of reasons, but primarily because it’s infrastructure that connects people to their city in new ways. What’s most fascinating is that we almost certainly don’t yet know what those ways are. I want to point out ...

It’s hard to find the right balance when bringing technology into our lives.  I do think lots of us suffer from some form of internet / social media addiction, and it’s getting easier and easier every day to bring all of that with us everywhere we go. This will only continue to accelerate (and I… Co...

Yesterday, I wrote a guest post on the Google Public Policy blog on “the clothesline paradox and the hidden economies of the web“, fleshing out an idea that was raised at the USV Hacking Society event back in April.  I’ll include the video, below, of the conversation that kicked off this thinking: T...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to invest lately.  I’m not just talking about investing money, in savings or stocks or whatever; I mean investing in a broader sense, in yourself and in everything you do. I am without question an urgency addict — as a general rule, I procrastinate, let t...