Last month, I went to the (most beautiful city in the world) Amsterdam, to speak at The Next Web Conference.  I did two talks, one at a sub-event focused on tech & social issues, on the topic of Data & Power, which I will post when it comes online, and a main stage talk on the topic of Purpose, Mission & Strategy -- how to connect the three to align efforts within a company. In the talk, I take examples from throughout our portfolio of how leaders define and communicate their purpose, within their organizations and externally, and then use that to make tough strategic calls.  For example, I wrote last week about how Cloudflare is fighting hard against patent trolls, and how deciding to do that is not just a narrow corporate decision, but a tough strategic call that draws from the company's sense of purpose and mission (frankly, I explain that example much better in the post than I did in the talk). For another example, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase just posted their long-term strategy yesterday, and this another example I discuss in the talk. I've been impressed by how Coinbase's efforts are aligned internally, and by the way Brian has connected the company's purpose and the strategy. You can watch the whole video (about 25 min) here: And you can see the slides here: This was my first time giving this talk, so of course there are things I'd tune for take two.  I would in particular like to thank the awesome folks at Praytell who hosted me for a dry run of the talk and gave me great feedback and questions.  And of course I would like to thank all of the USV leaders who, over the years, have shared their stories, which were the foundation of the talk.  

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.

One thing that's interesting about yesterday's Basic Attention Token sale is how quickly it went - $36M transacted in 30 sec. Lots of people were surely disappointed as they attempted to buy into the token sale only to have their orders canceled for missing the sale window. I haven't nailed this down for certain, but I suspect that all of the successful buys in the token sale were programmatically executed through smart contracts, rather than by hand.  The entire sale was tied to milestones in the Ethereum blockchain, making this possible.  From the BAT sale site:

"The sale of BAT will begin at the time that mining commences on Ethereum block 3,798,640 and continue until the time that 156,250 Ether has been received or mining commences on Ethereum block 3,963,480, whichever is earlier. This is the “sale period."

I honestly don't know the mechanics of Ethereum well enough to really diagnose this, but my guess is that there were lots of buy contracts that were triggered to execute along side block 3,798,640. I don't think that we are quite prepared for what a world driven by "smart contracts" will feel like - despite the fact that we have had high frequency trading for years, smart contracts that auto-execute on blockchains will bring really fast transaction execution to lots more areas of life. I am not sure that there's anything wrong with that, just pointing out that it's going to feel quite different than what we are used to today.

Last month, I went to the (most beautiful city in the world) Amsterdam, to speak at The Next Web Conference.  I did two talks, one at a sub-event focused on tech & social issues, on the topic of Data & Power, which I will post when it comes online, and a main stage talk on the topic of Purpose, Mission & Strategy -- how to connect the three to align efforts within a company. In the talk, I take examples from throughout our portfolio of how leaders define and communicate their purpose, within their organizations and externally, and then use that to make tough strategic calls.  For example, I wrote last week about how Cloudflare is fighting hard against patent trolls, and how deciding to do that is not just a narrow corporate decision, but a tough strategic call that draws from the company's sense of purpose and mission (frankly, I explain that example much better in the post than I did in the talk). For another example, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase just posted their long-term strategy yesterday, and this another example I discuss in the talk. I've been impressed by how Coinbase's efforts are aligned internally, and by the way Brian has connected the company's purpose and the strategy. You can watch the whole video (about 25 min) here: And you can see the slides here: This was my first time giving this talk, so of course there are things I'd tune for take two.  I would in particular like to thank the awesome folks at Praytell who hosted me for a dry run of the talk and gave me great feedback and questions.  And of course I would like to thank all of the USV leaders who, over the years, have shared their stories, which were the foundation of the talk.  

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.

One thing that's interesting about yesterday's Basic Attention Token sale is how quickly it went - $36M transacted in 30 sec. Lots of people were surely disappointed as they attempted to buy into the token sale only to have their orders canceled for missing the sale window. I haven't nailed this down for certain, but I suspect that all of the successful buys in the token sale were programmatically executed through smart contracts, rather than by hand.  The entire sale was tied to milestones in the Ethereum blockchain, making this possible.  From the BAT sale site:

"The sale of BAT will begin at the time that mining commences on Ethereum block 3,798,640 and continue until the time that 156,250 Ether has been received or mining commences on Ethereum block 3,963,480, whichever is earlier. This is the “sale period."

I honestly don't know the mechanics of Ethereum well enough to really diagnose this, but my guess is that there were lots of buy contracts that were triggered to execute along side block 3,798,640. I don't think that we are quite prepared for what a world driven by "smart contracts" will feel like - despite the fact that we have had high frequency trading for years, smart contracts that auto-execute on blockchains will bring really fast transaction execution to lots more areas of life. I am not sure that there's anything wrong with that, just pointing out that it's going to feel quite different than what we are used to today.