I just got done coaching my son's baseball practice. It has been amazing to watch this group of 7 and 8 year olds improve over the course of the season - learning the fundamentals and now starting to make some pretty great plays. I had a great baseball coach as a kid. I'll never forget the feeling of having the coach show us the right way to throw, and how weird it felt at first, and then how normal it felt eventually. He said: "practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect", and that has always stuck with me. It is the idea in Angela Duckworth's book, Grit, that sustained, directed effort is the thing that gets people from good to great. Making little steps every day, targeted to improve the weaknesses you want to work on. At the USV CEO summit a few weeks ago, the CEO of a very large, successful and fast growing company said something to the effect of "we have always reminded ourselves to have a big vision, but to take small steps to get there" (I am butchering the language but you get the idea. It really struck me because it is easy to think that for companies to grow and be great and big, every improvement has to be a giant, immediate leap. That's a hard mindset to shake, because it's just so intuitive, and there is also so much pressure to grow and succeed. But really, all you can do is focus on getting a little better every day. And over time, each of those improvements is part of the overall improvement, which compounds as it grows. I think it can be hard to give yourself the space, and have the patience, to just focus on making small improvements every day. But it feels to me like this is a very healthy and productive mindset if you can find it.
The week before last, my in-laws were hit by a truck while crossing the street after dinner. The time since has been a disorienting whirlwind of sadness, fear, hope and thankfulness. My mother-in-law suffered a very serious brain injury, and while she has cleared the first hurdle of basic survival, the outlook won't be clear for quite some time. It's been enormously trying on the whole family, and will continue to be for a long time; maybe forever. The issue I want to reflect on here is how, in the face of previously unimaginable circumstances, we seem to have the ability to quickly reset to the new normal. Two weeks ago it was unthinkable that this would have happened and she'd be in this condition, and now, that's just how things are -- that's where we're starting from and it's what we have to work with. I find that encouraging, and also a little bit scary. On the one hand, it shows how adaptable humans are, how we can handle more than we might think. On the other hand, it shows how fragile any current environment or situation can be. I'm inspired by our ability to take things in stride, and also a little bit terrified by the reality of how quickly things can change. For instance, lots of the talk this election cycle has been drawing parallels between now and the WWII era, in particular looking at what people did or didn't do to stop the rise of Hitler. As with Trump today, Germans of the 1930s
I just got done coaching my son's baseball practice. It has been amazing to watch this group of 7 and 8 year olds improve over the course of the season - learning the fundamentals and now starting to make some pretty great plays. I had a great baseball coach as a kid. I'll never forget the feeling of having the coach show us the right way to throw, and how weird it felt at first, and then how normal it felt eventually. He said: "practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect", and that has always stuck with me. It is the idea in Angela Duckworth's book, Grit, that sustained, directed effort is the thing that gets people from good to great. Making little steps every day, targeted to improve the weaknesses you want to work on. At the USV CEO summit a few weeks ago, the CEO of a very large, successful and fast growing company said something to the effect of "we have always reminded ourselves to have a big vision, but to take small steps to get there" (I am butchering the language but you get the idea. It really struck me because it is easy to think that for companies to grow and be great and big, every improvement has to be a giant, immediate leap. That's a hard mindset to shake, because it's just so intuitive, and there is also so much pressure to grow and succeed. But really, all you can do is focus on getting a little better every day. And over time, each of those improvements is part of the overall improvement, which compounds as it grows. I think it can be hard to give yourself the space, and have the patience, to just focus on making small improvements every day. But it feels to me like this is a very healthy and productive mindset if you can find it.
The week before last, my in-laws were hit by a truck while crossing the street after dinner. The time since has been a disorienting whirlwind of sadness, fear, hope and thankfulness. My mother-in-law suffered a very serious brain injury, and while she has cleared the first hurdle of basic survival, the outlook won't be clear for quite some time. It's been enormously trying on the whole family, and will continue to be for a long time; maybe forever. The issue I want to reflect on here is how, in the face of previously unimaginable circumstances, we seem to have the ability to quickly reset to the new normal. Two weeks ago it was unthinkable that this would have happened and she'd be in this condition, and now, that's just how things are -- that's where we're starting from and it's what we have to work with. I find that encouraging, and also a little bit scary. On the one hand, it shows how adaptable humans are, how we can handle more than we might think. On the other hand, it shows how fragile any current environment or situation can be. I'm inspired by our ability to take things in stride, and also a little bit terrified by the reality of how quickly things can change. For instance, lots of the talk this election cycle has been drawing parallels between now and the WWII era, in particular looking at what people did or didn't do to stop the rise of Hitler. As with Trump today, Germans of the 1930s
, and I'm sure couldn't believe that such a radical change in national character could happen so quickly. Whether or not you find that comparison fair, the point is that things can change quickly (or
). Given that, I'm thinking about two things: First, man you gotta appreciate what you have when you have it. Looking back at photos from two weeks ago, or thinking about the last time we saw each other a day before the accident -- that's a lifetime ago now. And it's cliche, but realizing how quickly things can change really helps you motivate to appreciate what you have. Whether that's family, friends, democracy, or the environment (however imperfect each may be). For the past week, every time I've been snuggled up with my kids & my wife, or enjoying a moment with a friend, or tackling an interesting work-related issue, I've been hyper aware of how awesome is to be alive and doing that. Second, maybe change isn't so scary after all. Someone once explained this to me as
. We burn a lot of effort and energy worrying about what might happen and what it might mean, resisting any exposure to pain. But this is ineffective and counterproductive, and in fact only
increases
our suffering. When bad things actually do happen, we face the pain and move through it, and only then are then able to build up. This is hard to internalize, especially with smaller things on a day-to-day basis, but I think there's something there to grab onto. To sum up, I just want to say thank you to everyone that has been supporting us through this time, and also thank you to everyone out there putting one foot in front of the other to get through every day, no matter
, a large gathering of entrepreneurs and hackers from eastern and southern Europe. I had a great time meeting folks from that part of the world, and it was awesome to spend two days at the beautiful
in Split. For my talk, I wanted to get a little macro and look at where we are in the cycle of the installation and deployment of the "information and telecommunications era", and how that connects with how we are looking at the investment landscape at USV. Here's the video of the talk. My main point that history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme, or put another way: same old song, this time in a different key. If you watch the first two minutes of the video you'll get an illustrated take on that starting with J-Lo in 2002 and getting all the way back to Herbie Mann in 1974: I'll give a quick annotated review of the talk here:
Macro Cycles
USV's original investment thesis was heavily influenced by economist Carlota Perez whose research detailed the life cycle of new technologies as they enter and penetrate society. Perez found that fundamental new technologies -- the kinds that radically re-shape the economy and society -- tend to follow a common pattern, which she breaks into two phases: installation and deployment. The installation phase is characterized by wild exuberance and exponential growth, as a new technology breaks onto the scene and the early leaders take hold. The deployment phase, which typically occurs after some sort of blow-up (in the market or in law/regulation/society), sees the technology penetrate all corners of society, slowly but surely re-shaping norms, laws, customs, regulations, etc. Looking at the last ~40 years of computing and the internet (26 years now since the birth of the WWW), we can see this cycle play out, perhaps with the dot-com bomb of 2000 marking the inflection point:
Looking at the shapes of the curves during these two respective phases, you'll notice that the farther we get into the deployment phase, the more the rate of growth flattens out, as the technology is better understood and therefore de-risked. Perhaps the specific dates shown here are right, or perhaps not -- you could argue that the "deployment phase" really didn't take hold until mobile was firmly in place (2008 ish), but the point is really just that: at this point, the overall operating model of web+mobile is understood, and the world is well along in adopting it and applying it to all things. Another way of saying that is that now, in the deployment phase of the web+mobile era, the incumbent industries from the previous era (the industrial era) are all facing intense competition and are under threat of being re-shaped in the web+mobile model:
At the same time, however, we're seeing the other end of the cycle begin to play out: we now have "new incumbents" representing the web+ mobile model. This is Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook (from the first big wave of desktop applications), and now Uber, Airbnb, Instagram etc (from the second wave of mobile applications). Now that these new incumbents have staked out their territory, we're in the middle of the traditional cycle of technology power wars as big platforms duke it out, and new insurgents try to poke holes in their grip:
I'm not prepared to say that today's "new insurgents" (essentially blockchain companies and others that are challenging incumbents on data control practices) necessarily represent the next great surge, but there is undoubtedly a serious amount of activity that's focused on disrupting the "traditional" web+mobile model, as opposed to further deploying it farther into society/industry. So to summarize, the two big forces we're focused on at the moment are the deployment of the web+mobile model, reshaping the communications architecture of every industry, and the disruption of the web and mobile model, challenging the new incumbents based on their data architecture:
, and I'm sure couldn't believe that such a radical change in national character could happen so quickly. Whether or not you find that comparison fair, the point is that things can change quickly (or
). Given that, I'm thinking about two things: First, man you gotta appreciate what you have when you have it. Looking back at photos from two weeks ago, or thinking about the last time we saw each other a day before the accident -- that's a lifetime ago now. And it's cliche, but realizing how quickly things can change really helps you motivate to appreciate what you have. Whether that's family, friends, democracy, or the environment (however imperfect each may be). For the past week, every time I've been snuggled up with my kids & my wife, or enjoying a moment with a friend, or tackling an interesting work-related issue, I've been hyper aware of how awesome is to be alive and doing that. Second, maybe change isn't so scary after all. Someone once explained this to me as
. We burn a lot of effort and energy worrying about what might happen and what it might mean, resisting any exposure to pain. But this is ineffective and counterproductive, and in fact only
increases
our suffering. When bad things actually do happen, we face the pain and move through it, and only then are then able to build up. This is hard to internalize, especially with smaller things on a day-to-day basis, but I think there's something there to grab onto. To sum up, I just want to say thank you to everyone that has been supporting us through this time, and also thank you to everyone out there putting one foot in front of the other to get through every day, no matter
, a large gathering of entrepreneurs and hackers from eastern and southern Europe. I had a great time meeting folks from that part of the world, and it was awesome to spend two days at the beautiful
in Split. For my talk, I wanted to get a little macro and look at where we are in the cycle of the installation and deployment of the "information and telecommunications era", and how that connects with how we are looking at the investment landscape at USV. Here's the video of the talk. My main point that history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme, or put another way: same old song, this time in a different key. If you watch the first two minutes of the video you'll get an illustrated take on that starting with J-Lo in 2002 and getting all the way back to Herbie Mann in 1974: I'll give a quick annotated review of the talk here:
Macro Cycles
USV's original investment thesis was heavily influenced by economist Carlota Perez whose research detailed the life cycle of new technologies as they enter and penetrate society. Perez found that fundamental new technologies -- the kinds that radically re-shape the economy and society -- tend to follow a common pattern, which she breaks into two phases: installation and deployment. The installation phase is characterized by wild exuberance and exponential growth, as a new technology breaks onto the scene and the early leaders take hold. The deployment phase, which typically occurs after some sort of blow-up (in the market or in law/regulation/society), sees the technology penetrate all corners of society, slowly but surely re-shaping norms, laws, customs, regulations, etc. Looking at the last ~40 years of computing and the internet (26 years now since the birth of the WWW), we can see this cycle play out, perhaps with the dot-com bomb of 2000 marking the inflection point:
Looking at the shapes of the curves during these two respective phases, you'll notice that the farther we get into the deployment phase, the more the rate of growth flattens out, as the technology is better understood and therefore de-risked. Perhaps the specific dates shown here are right, or perhaps not -- you could argue that the "deployment phase" really didn't take hold until mobile was firmly in place (2008 ish), but the point is really just that: at this point, the overall operating model of web+mobile is understood, and the world is well along in adopting it and applying it to all things. Another way of saying that is that now, in the deployment phase of the web+mobile era, the incumbent industries from the previous era (the industrial era) are all facing intense competition and are under threat of being re-shaped in the web+mobile model:
At the same time, however, we're seeing the other end of the cycle begin to play out: we now have "new incumbents" representing the web+ mobile model. This is Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook (from the first big wave of desktop applications), and now Uber, Airbnb, Instagram etc (from the second wave of mobile applications). Now that these new incumbents have staked out their territory, we're in the middle of the traditional cycle of technology power wars as big platforms duke it out, and new insurgents try to poke holes in their grip:
I'm not prepared to say that today's "new insurgents" (essentially blockchain companies and others that are challenging incumbents on data control practices) necessarily represent the next great surge, but there is undoubtedly a serious amount of activity that's focused on disrupting the "traditional" web+mobile model, as opposed to further deploying it farther into society/industry. So to summarize, the two big forces we're focused on at the moment are the deployment of the web+mobile model, reshaping the communications architecture of every industry, and the disruption of the web and mobile model, challenging the new incumbents based on their data architecture:
