Last week, as I have done for the last several years, I gave a guest lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The class is DPI-662: Digital Government: Technology, Policy, and Public Service Innovation taught by my old friend David Eaves and the topic in recent years has been on Cryptonetworks and Blockchains.

I am always amazed at the people in the class — incredible diversity of backgrounds from around the world. And as we have discussed crypto over the past few years, the conversation has gotten better and better — whereas a few years ago it was a curiosity it is clear that people are paying close attention.

Here is the deck I used for the talk. Like many of my presentations on crypto, it is geared towards newer technical audiences with a deeper policy slant. Makes less sense without the narrative, but I have included speaker notes which you can see in the Google Slides version.

Enjoy!

At USV, we talk a lot about our investment thesis. The USV thesis is a set of ideas that has guided our investing over the years. It is a tool we use to help ourselves know what to look for, and to help companies who fit into it to find us.

Despite all of the writing we have done on the thesis over the years, some parts of the it remain understood, but unwritten. One of those is what I like to call “The Butter Thesis”.

“Butter” is the term we use to describe interactions & experiences that are just so smooth. Rich, easy, delicious. Hard to define formally, but you know it when you see it / feel it.

Butter can apply to dev tools, enterprise/b2b products, and consumer products.

Classic examples of Dev Butter are the Stripe API and the Twilio API. Tools that are just so simple and fun to use (and useful!) that you just can’t help build with them. Or, the first time you install Cloudflare and your site just gets fast and the DDOS just stops. OMG Firebase. Takes my breath away. Or before that, Ruby on Rails and jQuery. The category-defining tools of each era of development have succeeded in large part because of their Buttery-ness.

B2B Butter is Airtable and Slack (and really, Google Docs, though that’s less exciting somehow). Or in narrower vertical, Splice. Or, in a hidden horizontal, Carta. Tools that make working together so so much easier — like, hard to imagine what it was like before they existed.

On the consumer side, Butter means end-user experiences that are frictionless and joyful. For example, I recently went to China and was blown away by the QR Code experience — straight butter wherever you go, linking the real world to the online world. Duolingo is Butter for Learning. Nurx is Butter for Health. Coinbase is Butter for Crypto. Amazon Prime is Butter for e-Commerce.

Building for butter means understanding that every step of the experience can be honed, smoothed and improved, to the point that it’s so good you just can’t take it. Butter is deceptively simple. A single ingredient that yet does so much.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?! Maybe this is obvious and isn’t that deep. But it is hard to pull off, and truly extraordinary when it is accomplished.

A few weeks ago at the CoinAlts conference in Chicago, I did a fireside chat with Sam McIngvale, CEO of Coinbase Custody. CoinAlts is a conference focused mostly on the institutional infrastructure around crypto assets — legal, accounting, custody, etc. So we started out talking about the evolving role of custody in the crypto markets, and also talked generally about what we’re excited about in the next few years. It was a lot of fun. Here it is:

As I turned to write this, I was in the middle of reviewing a document a friend had asked me to look at a little while ago. In somewhat typical fashion, I had not done it right away, and had basically forgotten about it until he pinged me again, and even then I didn’t get to it right away.

I feel terrible about that, and as I reflect on things as part of Yom Kippur today, I realize that one of the things I feel the worst about over the past year is being a bad communicator. I have let things drop and haven’t been responsive. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of respect and I have not done a good enough job.

So for the many of you out there (including readers of this blog — notice no new posts for about 5 months…) who I’ve done this to, I am sorry. I will do better.

Yesterday, we had a team offsite at USV, which included a “presentation party” where a bunch of us gave 3-minute presentations on a variety of topics. It was actually a perfect window into everyone’s personality — Andy gleaned lessons about venture capital from music lyrics (of course), Albert talked about beauty in math focusing on the Fibonacci sequence, Bethany talked about her early entrepreneurial adventures with Beanie Babies, Gillian walked us through the fun things you can find in a proxy statement, Matt introduced us to Kayfabe. That’s just a few, but suffice to say they were all great, and were totally on-brand with everyone’s personalities.

Not surprisingly, I decided to talk about the beauty I see in Baseball, focusing on just one small thing: the way the batter reads the spin on an incoming pitch. Here it is — enjoy (I recommend holding a baseball while you watch, if you have one):