My son played in a baseball tournament this weekend. His team did well, and finished as the runner-up. The team that beat them in the finals played really well, but more importantly, it was obvious that they had a strong culture of success.

From the moment they walked on the field, they had a noticeable “bounce”. – they were literally bouncing around with energy and excitement. When they started warming up, it wasn’t haphazard and sloppy, but rather organized, energetic, and purposeful. It was clear that they had a warm-up routine designed to instill focus. It was led by the kids themselves. They had a huddle before every inning at-bat ending with a cheer of “hit!” and boy did they hit the ball well (better than any team I’ve seen all season). They cheered every kid on in a major way, and bounced in celebration when they scored. When they won, they posed for a team photo and the coach said “ok, time for your first Legends’ point” and they pointed to the camera in a victory celebration (the club was called the Legends) — teaching the kids that not only were they part of a long-term culture of winning, but that this was just their first step on their path. Even when they were sitting together before the game eating lunch, they had togetherness and winning baseball in their eyes. They were having fun the whole time, and it was clear that at every step of the way, the club’s culture was behind it.

I looked through at the club website, and it became clear that what I witnessed was not a one-off moment, but part of a bigger culture. This club has a practice facility where they do game situation indoor practice all winter long (with trophies conspicuously mounted). I saw pictures on the website of older kids doing the same pre-game drills in that facility, with the same intensity. They have camps, and dinners, and skills clinics. I can just imagine the youngest members of the club (my son’s age) watching the bigger kids do the drills, and the chants, and the movements & motions.

Having coached baseball for 10 seasons now (5 years x 2 seasons per year), and having played high school ball on an pretty good team and little league ball on a very good travel team (1989 NYC Federal League champions, 46-5 record — yes, I am still proud of that), I am particularly attuned to the dynamics of winning (and less winning) teams.

And now, working in the startup / VC world, I see from the inside what winning (and less winning) teams look like. USV has built a culture of success over the last 15 years, which I am hell bent on carrying forward to the next generation.

Success is one part ability/skills and one part culture. The skills are the raw material and the culture is what makes it great. So what makes for a culture of success?

This is material for a series of posts rather than just one, but I’ll focus on a few observations & memories here:

1/ Legend & lore — winning begets winning, especially in generational enterprises like companies and sports clubs (just look at the Yankees, or Duke Basketball). The younger generation needs to look up to the older one and learn what success looks like and how to model it.

2/ Body language — so much of success is about feeling poised and energized. Think “power pose”. The team this weekend had it.

3/ Structure — complex tasks like building a company or hitting a baseball need to be broken down into pieces so they can be understood and mastered. Figuring out how to do this in the right way is the magic of coaching, and it’s not easy. How can you take an amorphous goal and break it into understandable pieces, ideally explainable with metaphors, analogies, and anecdotes?

4/ Fun — this seems silly but it’s really important. Teams succeed when they are having fun, and they have fun when they succeed.

That is it for now. I’m heading into my week energized and inspired.

This week was the annual USV CEO Summit, one of my favorite moments of every year (remarkably, this was my 8th summit, and they seem to get better and better). The theme of this year’s summit was “Trust”, which, for those paying close attention, is the anchor of USV’s investment thesis 3.0.

We have been spending a lot of time thinking about the concept of trust, what we mean by it, and how we think it can become an actionable part of a startup strategy. More on that to come.

As part of the summit yesterday, we asked a handful of CEO’s to talk about what trust means in the context of their product and/or company. As you can imagine, there are many different ways to look at it and think about it. Here, I’d like to point out the framework that CircleUp‘s Ryan Caldbeck presented, which is:

1/ I recently learned a way of framing trust – I don’t know who originally created this equation but I learned separately from @jorgestubbs and LifeLabs.

Trust = Credibility x Reliability x Vulnerability

Let’s talk about components of equation and I’ll explain why I love it.
— Ryan Caldbeck (@ryan_caldbeck) July 2, 2018

(click through to read the entire thread with Ryan’s commentary)

I found this to be surprisingly simple and profoundly useful. I hope it’s useful for you too.

Like most people, I have struggled over the years to comes up with a organizational/productivity system that works for me. Disclaimer: I do not yet have it down perfectly, and am not claiming guru status. But I do have a few things that have worked pretty well, and I have noticed some things that others do that seem to work, so I will share those here.

I have a somewhat elaborate system which I will explain below, but at the end of the day it all boils down to a single strategy: getting things into my calendar. The other main thing I try to solve for is simply not forgetting things. I live in a constant stream of emails and meetings, and it’s easy to forget something important. So a goal here is to help ensure that I don’t forget things and ultimately, that I’m focused on the most important thing most of the time.

I live by the calendar and generally obey it. This is a trick I learned from Fred, who doesn’t use any productivity system except for brute force email and calendaring everything. Getting something into my calendar is the most sure-fire way that it will get done — having a date and time attached to something gives it a lot more weight than a wishy-washy entry on a list of to-dos or “priorities”.

Working backwards from the calendar as ultimate do-place, I have a few tricks for capturing and prioritizing, loosely based on the “Getting Things Done” theory of capture/clarify/organize/etc. As much as possible, I try to get big things out of my Inbox and into a place where I can see and organize. For this I use Trello. I have a board I use every day that looks like this:

From right to left:

The main show here is the “priorities” list, where I try to pluck out the important big things on my plate — this helps me make sure I am not forgetting something. Roughly daily, I review this list, sort it, and make sure things are in my calendar to do.

Another list in my Trello is “meetings”. I use this list to capture high-level takeaways from meetings. I am a big believer in the concept of the “commonplace book” and the value of taking notes and reviewing them over time. For me this step is more about just general processing rather than to-dos, though there is a to-do component. I take meeting notes by hand in a small notebook (currently a moleskine but in the old days I used a spiral bound), and always mark follow-ups with a “F/U” with a circle around it — this is a trick I learned from Phil Myrick back when I worked at PPS. As a way of processing the meeting notes, I make a card in trello for each meeting and add the follow-ups as checklist items (Dani has a system similar to this, using Notion, and I’m always impressed with how well it seems to help her process meetings). For little things, I just do them right away, for bigger ones, I prioritize and calendar them.

On the left is the “Inbound” list. I use this to capture fleeting thoughts, ideas and notes. Things get on this list in two ways: 1) via Wunderlist, which I mainly use by phone — I have found this to be the easiest and quickest way for me to jot something down on the go. I use Zapier to move things from my main list in Wunderlist into “inbound” on Trello. 2) I use Trello’s built-in email-to-board feature to get larger items out of my inbox and into Trello. Again, the goal here is just to capture so I can process/prioritize later.

Another input into this system is my other notebook, the Ink+Volt Planner. I am on my third year of using this wonderful tool: it’s a structured goal and priorities setting notebook that helps you create and reach yearly, monthly and weekly goals. I find that the Ink+Volt, like meditation, helps me cut through the noise and see what’s important more clearly. I do a planner session every week (it’s in the calendar), and use that to inform all of the above.

Having now written all of this, it seems pretty clear that this is a lot of work, and may be excessively complex. My wife would probably describe this as “planning to plan”, and just an elaborate mechanism for avoiding doing the actual stuff, or something like that. That may indeed be so, and I often think about Fred’s simple strategy of blast relentlessly through email and calendar everything. It is impressive and seems to work. Mostly, I use this system so that I am not just at the whims of my inbox.

For sure, my biggest weakness is email, which I still struggle with. Albert has a system here, which seems to work for him, which is: using a set of predefined gmail filters, clear the inbox daily. Not the entire inbox, but a few filtered versions (family, USV team, his portfolio companies). I’m not there yet.

So, there you have it. That’s my system. It’s a work in progress. What’s yours?

Community is a funny thing. It can sound like a fluffy word or concept, but it’s actually really powerful. Maybe more powerful than many things.

Community is about helping people feel connected and aligned. When people are connected, they feel warm and good, and part of something bigger than themselves. When people are aligned, each of their individual efforts adds to the whole overall effort, so you have a lot of leverage.

There are so many examples of this. Here’s one: today is International Women’s Day — essentially an effort to get 1/2 half of humanity connected and aligned around a sense of community. On a much smaller level (and as a part of that), some friends of ours own a restaurant near where we live. As part of Women’s Day, the restaurant hosted an event, and was bustling all day long with people from the neighborhood, all wearing purple and doing a variety of activities. The restaurant itself is an important center of community where we live, and today it was plugging into an even bigger community movement.

Or, dating back to a past life where I helped create Streetsblog and Streetfilms: these were both community media efforts in the transportation policy space. When these launched, back in 2006, there were already plenty of organizations doing good policy work in this area. What Streetsblog and Streetfilms added were online places where this passionate community could come together, gain energy, and grow. The streetsblog comments section was (and is, today) a hotbed of community, and the Streetfilms videos (nearly 1000 today) highlighted community stories and community members. It was, and is today, a powerful force that has multiplied the effectiveness of people working on these issues.

Or let’s look at examples from the cryptocurrency space, like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Both of these (and other strong communities in the crypto space) have developed something bigger than a company ever could, in terms of the connection and alignment of the community. These communities are wild and wooly, for sure, but they are broad and deep and powerful. People who are deep into them feel like the are really part of something.

At USV, we invest quite a lot in community. We have a network team whose mission it is to build community among our portfolio companies — in this case charged with helping everyone become better at their jobs, and helping their companies succeed. The USV Network started out as a pilot program led by Gary back in 2010, was then grown larger by Brittany, and is now a 4-person team, scaled up by Bethany, that’s running over 150 events per year and managing a ~4,000 person online community.

It can be hard to measure the impact of community, and this can make it hard to know how well you’re doing when your job is to cultivate. But sometimes you can just know it when you see it / feel it.

Picking back up the series on what decentralization is good for (part 1, part 2), today I want to focus on one of the most exciting aspects of decentralization: growth.

In this case, when I say “decentralized”, what I really mean is “open and non-proprietary”. The two often go hand-in-hand.

Ok, so why are open, decentralized systems especially good for growth? When a technology is open (anyone can use, extend, modify, build on) and decentralized (no one party or company is in full control), it has the potential to spread like wildfire, for exactly those reasons. Since it is free to use without restriction, permissionless innovation is possible — meaning anyone who feels like it can pick it up and run. And because open, decentralized systems reduce platform risk, developers can feel comfortable building on them with less of a risk of getting the carpet pulled out from under them.

When this works, it works really well. Many of the technologies we use every day — like HTTP, SMTP, WiFi, USB and Bluetooth — have become ubiquitous precisely because they are open, nonproprietary and decentralized in nature (in addition to being useful!).

Everyone knows that it’s safe to build to the Bluetooth standard without platform risk. And what that means is that anyone, no matter what company they are with, or what country they live in, has the potential to grow the platform. This kind of omni-directional growth is really only possible with open, un-owned, decentralized technologies.

Often times, however, a single company drives the development of these open, un-owned, decentralized technologies. For example, the General Transit Feed Specification is on open data format that powers most of the public transit industry. As I have written about before, this standard came to market in large part because of Google’s initial efforts, and was then adopted and grown by a large community of others (including our work at OpenPlans back in 2009-2012). Or, to go farther back, we can look at the role that Mozilla/Firefox played in bringing modern web standards (includuing Cascading Style Sheets) to market. Or to today, and Apple’s and Google’s role in bringing USB-C to market (of course, Apple does not have the best track record on this topic). The point is, it can be difficult for open, nonproprietary, decentralized technologies to take off — they need some sort of catapult. Historically that has come from companies with some self-interest — this has been a good thing (generally speaking).

Today, in addition to companies driving open technologies, we have the potential to use cryptocurrencies to drive initial adoption. We seen this work to great effect with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other platforms, and while the specific mechanics are still being explored and experimented with, the basic concept is clear: we can use cryptocurrencies and tokens to bootstrap new open, non-proprietary, decentralized technology platforms. It doesn’t work every time — and we will no doubt continue to see a parade of flameouts — but when it does work, it has the potential to work in a massive, exceedingly rapid, and global way.