The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Butter Thesis
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 u...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanYou Never Know When You've Had a Good Day
Many years ago, when I had just started working at USV, I remember there was kind of a complicated situation that unfolded in a seemingly bad way, and I'll never forget what Brad said in response. He said:you never know when you've had a good dayI didn't really understand what that meant, so he told me a story that went something like: back around the year 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom, there was a guy who was a senior exec at a successful startup. That person had a falling out with ...
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The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Butter Thesis
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 u...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanYou Never Know When You've Had a Good Day
Many years ago, when I had just started working at USV, I remember there was kind of a complicated situation that unfolded in a seemingly bad way, and I'll never forget what Brad said in response. He said:you never know when you've had a good dayI didn't really understand what that meant, so he told me a story that went something like: back around the year 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom, there was a guy who was a senior exec at a successful startup. That person had a falling out with ...
Subscribe to The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
>1.2K subscribers
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I spent part of the train ride home today working on a coding project (the Highrise bookmarklet I blogged about wanting on Monday). It's almost done and I'm excited to start using it. I am not a great programmer, but I like it a lot. I only took one CS course in college. I really learned to program in the ~10 years after college, teaching myself from books and online resources, spending a ton of time using view-source to see how web pages were built, and hacking things together using open source tools like WordPress. There is an important and profound combination of things in that last statement, about the hackability and learnability of the web. That combination of things made it possible for me to build a ton of new skills, and really an entire career, because a) it was possible for me to explore how the pros had built things and b) it was really easy to get help online, from documentation wikis, discussion forums and blogs. And now, there are more and more amazing tools that help this process along, from open-source sharing sites like Github to amazing Q&A sites like StackOverflow. Today's success was possible, in large part, thanks to the kind folks who ask questions, post answers, and share code in these places and more. It's amazing, really, so thank you. Further, I can say with absolute honesty, that I owe my career to the openness of the web. To the fact that I've been able to examine, tinker, ask, learn, and experiment in these ways is something that underlies everything else. I guess I'm writing this to remind myself that despite the fact that I'm not a hard-core open source person (I'm writing this on a Mac), I really do feel a profound personal connection to the openness of the web. And that's one reason among many that it's something worth working to protect.
I spent part of the train ride home today working on a coding project (the Highrise bookmarklet I blogged about wanting on Monday). It's almost done and I'm excited to start using it. I am not a great programmer, but I like it a lot. I only took one CS course in college. I really learned to program in the ~10 years after college, teaching myself from books and online resources, spending a ton of time using view-source to see how web pages were built, and hacking things together using open source tools like WordPress. There is an important and profound combination of things in that last statement, about the hackability and learnability of the web. That combination of things made it possible for me to build a ton of new skills, and really an entire career, because a) it was possible for me to explore how the pros had built things and b) it was really easy to get help online, from documentation wikis, discussion forums and blogs. And now, there are more and more amazing tools that help this process along, from open-source sharing sites like Github to amazing Q&A sites like StackOverflow. Today's success was possible, in large part, thanks to the kind folks who ask questions, post answers, and share code in these places and more. It's amazing, really, so thank you. Further, I can say with absolute honesty, that I owe my career to the openness of the web. To the fact that I've been able to examine, tinker, ask, learn, and experiment in these ways is something that underlies everything else. I guess I'm writing this to remind myself that despite the fact that I'm not a hard-core open source person (I'm writing this on a Mac), I really do feel a profound personal connection to the openness of the web. And that's one reason among many that it's something worth working to protect.
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