Avoidance is to be avoided.
— Nick Grossman (@nickgrossman) February 22, 2018

I’m on a plane right now. I always find plane/train rides to be some of the best times to focus and get work done. On this trip, I managed to get two “monkeys” off my back — little tasks that have been lingering in the back of my mind for a long time, and that I’ve been avoiding. It doesn’t matter what they are, but I can tell you that one of them was tiny — so tiny (literally 5 minutes to do), and one of them was sort of medium-sized (maybe 2 hours). So on this trip I finally stopped avoiding them Having these little monkeys is the worst feeling, and clearing them out feels so good.

What is so pernicious about avoidance is the way it turns small problems into big problems. I’ve written before about how Pain x Resistance = Suffering. The more you avoid/resist, the more pain you feel and the larger your “problem” actually gets. A 5 minute thing turns into hours, days, or weeks of avoidance. Avoidance is a debt frame of mind.

Amazingly, the reverse is also true. Taking “big” problems/challenges/tasks, and plugging away at them dutifully without resistance or avoidance, makes them smaller! If you just focus on getting a little better every day, all of a sudden you have compounding results. A little better every day is a capital frame of mind.

Don’t avoid. Rip off the band-aid. Take the medicine. Increase your throughput. Make today a little bit better. It will feel so good.

I’ve written for a long time about my desire to re-build personal finance infrastructure in ways that benefit people with the least money. We see new personal financial products all the time targeting high value customers, but it still feels like they are ignoring a huge, and important part of the market: people scraping by living paycheck-to-paycheck. This is a huge slice of America and the world, and I believe that tools that serve this population well will not only make a huge positive social impact, they can build huge businesses.

One such product that I’ve started using recently is the very aptly titled You Need a Budget. I have tried nearly every app out there that tries to help people get a handle on their moment-to-moment finances, but this is the most thoughtfully designed (and I suspect, the most effective) one I’ve seen so far.

YNAB is full of product nuances that show that they’ve thought deeply about how people use money, and how to help people craft effective budgets. The main idea, of course, is that you need to start with a budget. The nuanced parts are the way YNAB helps track budget categories, map expenses against them, make tradeoffs when categories are overbudget, and start to understand new concepts like aging your money.

Having used apps like Mint in the past, which work on the same ideas, I’ve found that YNAB has figured something new out, which is how to make tracking your money, and tending to your budget, a daily activity. The YNAB mobile app makes it easy to categorize expenses as they come in, on a daily basis. It’s this daily check in that both makes the process less overwhelming (since you’re only dealing with a handful of transactions at once) and potentially change-making, since you are reflecting on your budget and expenses in real time.

Getting a grip on finances is hard. It’s emotional, complicated and often overwhelming. I like the way YNAB demystifies the process and provides a real helping hand. I hope we see more things like this come to market.

We have spent a fair bit of time over the past year working on security at USV and across the USV portfolio. Anyone who has spent time working on personal or corporate security — and in particular information security, knows that there are a million ways in, and you’re never “finished”.

Fred wrote a bit about his experience last year, and we had an issue yesterday with Albert’s phone:

Thanks to everyone who has been helping me recover from a Twitter account takeover based on an unauthorized SIM switch on my phone
— Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) January 11, 2018

The way we have been thinking about it is in terms of “the weakest link”. It is critical to have your most important accounts (primary email, banking, crypto, etc) secured well, but it’s also important to work your way down the line to other accounts and entry points. The lesson being that attackers will seek the weakest point and work from there.

One of weakest points in personal security is the phone — cell carriers are notoriously bad at security, and attacks like phone porting and SIM swapping are common. For that reason, it’s important to move away from using SMS as a second factor backup wherever possible, and instead moving to apps like Google Authenticator, or to hardware-based 2FA using Yubikeys or similar.

Another weak point is personal email, or old email accounts. It’s easy to forget about old accounts that you used back in the day, but those can be problematic, especially if they are linked to other accounts, and if 2fA is non-existent or tied to SMS.

So, by all means, start with the most important accounts. But don’t stop there — keep sussing out weakest link.

For more resources on personal information security, see this excellent guide by EFF (written in the context of surveillance, but applicable to all attack vectors).

I’ve been quiet on the blog lately — writing is one of those things that’s hard to build a habit for, but always pays big dividends when you do it. Every time I’ve gotten into a good blogging rhythm I am undoubtedly surprised by the feedback I get (good and bad!), but more importantly, by the ripple effects. Writing is capital — you work to make it, and then it works for you.

As someone who likes to work with his hands (both in the analog and digital worlds), I feel pretty deeply connected to both labor and to capital. The process of making something (a table, an app, a blog post) can be deeply satisfying, and then the follow-on effects from that thing existing can (in the best cases) be very high leverage.

I would say my hands-on nature is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to this. Because I like “making stuff” I’m often drawn into projects where I might be better off hiring (or inspiring) someone else to do it, or delegating it somehow. When it comes to producing capital, sometimes actually the less you “do”, the more you can accomplish. I think of this as learning to develop a Capital mindset, over a Labor mindset.

Of course this relates to money as well. For the longest time — I think this was just my foundational mental model — I intuitively understood the idea that you work, and you get paid. Labor. Paid for your time. Despite the fact that I have worked for a long time in the software economy (and of course now, in venture capital), I had to overcome this idea of labor being the thing. For instance, I spent a lot of time in my early twenties as a freelance developer, building apps (capital) for others, but just getting paid for my time.

Maybe this is intuitively obvious to other people, but it has taken me some time to turn the corner and understand the value of, and the power of, capital. **Especially** capital you can build through your own efforts, like writing, or coding, or making music, art, etc.

I feel like it’s an overall very powerful frame, and is especially helpful when it comes to prioritizing your own time & activities — whether you are the CEO of a company, or a guy/gal sitting in your living room.

With that in mind, here is my first blog post of 2018. Here’s to a great year, everyone.

The week before last, we lost a dear friend to cancer. Deb was an incredibly sweet, caring and giving person. The memorial service last weekend was held at the elementary school where she taught first grade for the past 15 years. The room was decorated — to the hilt — with hearts, butterflies, and ribbons, all in her favorite color purple, and was covered in notes of love and appreciation from students, parents and colleagues.

During and after the service, I was overwhelmed by two feelings: first, the incredible compassion and caring that Deb exuded, in particular towards her family and students. It was palpable, and hung in the air long after the service was concluded. And second: the weight of the impact she had on all of the people she touched during her life. A friend of ours was remarking, after the ceremony, how lucky Deb was to be in a position to connect with, support, and serve so many people during her time here.

All of this has gotten me to thinking more about how much most of us get caught up in our own day-to-day anxieties and challenges, and how hard it can be, sometimes, to see over your own dashboard, so to speak. Myself included. It’s so easy to get hung up in our own personal challenges, desires, frustrations, anxieties and disappointments.

The great irony in this, is that one of the best ways to get out of your own shit, is to put yourself in the back seat and focus on serving others. I know Deb dealt with shyness and anxiety herself, and I suspect that this only added to her empathy when it came to supporting her family, friends and students.

Every time I have managed to do this in my life, the result has not only been to provide some sort of useful help (I hope), but also to quell the internal drama. In other words, perhaps the best way to escape from our own suffering is to help other people escape theirs. There are lots of ways to do this, many of which come naturally through the course of your day and are just a matter of reframing your own mindset, as opposed to finding something brand new (though that’s important too).

After Deb passed, we couldn’t help but notice her in the wind, and the sun, and the evening mist. Her energy may have left her body, but it certainly hasn’t left the world. And what I am trying to do is remember the power of her energy, and the importance of using whatever energy we all have, today and tomorrow, in the service of others.