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.

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.  

I was at an event last night, where the moderator, Preeti Varathan from QZ observed that there seemed to be a lot of cynicism in the blockchain / crypto space -- in other words, that the whole thing was essentially premised on a distrust of existing systems (fiat currencies, large internet companies, etc). It's an interesting and I would say correct observation, but it's also not the whole story.  In addition to the distrust angle, there is also an innovation angle (though it is related to the distrust angle), which I'll get to at the end. But to focus on this question of distrust: a few weeks ago, I was in Amsterdam for the TNW conference, doing a number of things on their "hard fork" track for crypto/blockchain projects.  Two conversations stood out: First was David Schwartz from Ripple, who gave what I thought was a fantastic and clear introduction to cryptosystems -- David's main point was that cryptonetworks are about fairness.  You set the rules (in code) and once they are set, everyone plays by them on even footing.  No one has the ability to rig the system once it is up and running. If this sounds a lot like a description of democracy and the rule of law, I think that's intentional.  The framers of the United States had very similar goals -- escaping a system that felt "rigged" and set up a rules-based system that had decentralization (3 branches of government, federal vs states, house vs senate, etc) and checks and balances built in. So why is there a pressing need for fairness (in money, in tech platforms) today?  The original bitcoiners were escaping what they saw as unfair depreciation of fiat currency due to inflation -- they were digital gold bugs who wanted a real store of value.  Beyond that, there is a generation of application developers who don't trust the platforms they are building on -- developers have a keen appreciation of power dynamics and know when they are getting screwed.  And beyond that, there is an even larger macro distrust and erosion of institutions brewing -- for example I hope that the US can hold on to its own (relatively) fair, rules-based system of governance, but that seems as threatened as ever.  So there are plenty of reasons to be cynical and distrusting, both of traditional finance, technology and government. On to the second conversation was that same day, at dinner with a number of Dutch citizens.  One gentleman made the point that "life is pretty good here, and we like our centralized institutions".  Anyone who's been to Amsterdam can probably relate.  Here is a picture from near where we were staying:

It's ridiculously beautiful and every time I'm there I am struck by how happy the Dutch seem to be -- cruising canals by boat, riding bikes everywhere, healthy chubby babies in tow.  Even their teenagers are happy.  I am obviously being flip here, but the point is -- when things are good, or seem to be good, there's little perceived need to change the system. To the last point about innovation: the thing that I am most excited about here (and I think I speak for most of us at USV) is what a decentralized asset/contract/data layer means for innovation. Because cryptosystems are open source, extensible and forkable by default, and because they operate on rules-based systems without arbitrary centralized control, we now have a wide open environment for innovation, both at the infrastructure and the application layers.  We are still so early in seeing what that will actually mean in terms of services that business and consumers can actually use, but we are building a very exciting foundation.