For the past two months, Frannie and I have been doing yoga.  It’s a totally new thing for me.  I was skeptical about it at first, but it’s been totally awesome and perspective changing.  Even though I am completely inflexible and unaccustomed to all of the poses (and perhaps because of this), doing the practice and cracking open my body in new ways has really had a noticeable effect.  I walk out of yoga feeling open, calm, confident, and clear.

There’s a lot I could talk about, but perhaps the idea that has stuck with me the most so far is the idea that we — generally speaking — walk around carrying an air of “subtle discontent”.  This is the nagging feeling that there’s something wrong, somethin missing,  something to get to (that’s not here), something more important to be focusing on, to be doing.  If you think about it and try to notice it, you might be surprised how ever-present it is.

This tends to manifest itself physically in tension between the eyebrows.  And a part of the yoga practice is noticing that feeling, releasing it, letting it melt away, and focusing on experiencing and enjoying the current moment.

For me at least — and I assume for lots of folks who are working hard and are generally under stress — this idea really hit home.  I think there is also something related to this in being hyper connected and constantly checking our phones.  Checking my phone, anxiously, habitually, for new emails, tweets, etc., is a certain form of this subtle discontent.  

And I love the idea of noticing it, being aware of it, melting it away, and refocusing on the present.

Last night at USV, we hosted the latest of several recent meetups on the “Peer Economy”.  We are in the process of organizing a number of companies and organizations that represent a certain sector of the internet economy in NYC, with an eye towards building a more formal coalition (perhaps in the model of San Francisco’s BayShare) at some point in the future. As is to be expected, we spent the bulk of the discussion trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that ties us all together.   I think there’s a pretty strong thread, but it’s not immediately clear how best to describe it.  So I hereby invite you, the Internet, into the conversation. So, as a thought experiment, how might you describe the common approaches and values between:

• peer-to-peer marketplace platforms like Etsy, Krrb, Skillshare, Shapeways and Zaarly;

• collaborative consumption networks like Airbnb and Carpooling.com;

• crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and LendingClub;

• co-working and education/development spaces like General Assembly and the DUMBO Startup Lab;

• support networks for independent professionals like the Freelancer’s Union;

• communications and media networks like Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud and StackExchange.

At USV, we have a word for all of this, which is simply “networks”.  That’s great and effective as an investment thesis, but it’s actually rather abstract as way of communicating the idea widely.  In Steven Johnson’s recent book Future Perfect, he uses the term “peer network”, which is better but still somewhat problematic (as peer means “pier” to most people and “napster” to others).  And our working description, as you can see, is “peer economy”. Anyway, rather than try to “draw a box” around all of this — we instead attempted to (at Matt Brimer’s suggestion) focus on the center — on the core opportunities, values, and methods that all of these communities believe in and operate around. The ones that stood out to me the most were:

• valuing creativity, self expression & individualism;

• increasing personal freedom through community support;

• creating economic empowerment;

• valuing authenticity and real human connection;

• built on trust (as developed within each community);

• and perhaps my favorite: Andrew Wagner’s “as New York as a slice of pizza”

In my world, I focus a lot on words like “innovation” and “networks” — but I think the thing that really stood out to me about last night’s conversation was the centrality of the human component.  Empowering “real people” to do new and awesome things.  To access new economic opportunities for themselves, while at the same time rediscovering community. The idea that stuck in my head last night is about the “Indie Web” — what’s so interesting about the web and the networks of people on it is that they are at the same time individual & independent AND hyper-connected.  The fact that we’re connected lets us be independent.  It’s almost a paradox. I like the idea that the web makes it possible to be an indie musician, dj or filmmaker, to be an indie craftsperson or manufacturer, an indie journalist, publisher, or even an indie scientist. And what makes most (if not all) of this possible is the ability to be an indie entrepreneur, whether that’s through an open source project, a meetup, a web app, or even a venture-backed company (which is, admittedly, a certain flavor of “indie”).   The point is, that on an open web, we have the unfettered ability to make new things that enable people to do new things.  Which is pretty awesome and exciting.

For the past two months, Frannie and I have been doing yoga.  It’s a totally new thing for me.  I was skeptical about it at first, but it’s been totally awesome and perspective changing.  Even though I am completely inflexible and unaccustomed to all of the poses (and perhaps because of this), doing the practice and cracking open my body in new ways has really had a noticeable effect.  I walk out of yoga feeling open, calm, confident, and clear.

There’s a lot I could talk about, but perhaps the idea that has stuck with me the most so far is the idea that we — generally speaking — walk around carrying an air of “subtle discontent”.  This is the nagging feeling that there’s something wrong, somethin missing,  something to get to (that’s not here), something more important to be focusing on, to be doing.  If you think about it and try to notice it, you might be surprised how ever-present it is.

This tends to manifest itself physically in tension between the eyebrows.  And a part of the yoga practice is noticing that feeling, releasing it, letting it melt away, and focusing on experiencing and enjoying the current moment.

For me at least — and I assume for lots of folks who are working hard and are generally under stress — this idea really hit home.  I think there is also something related to this in being hyper connected and constantly checking our phones.  Checking my phone, anxiously, habitually, for new emails, tweets, etc., is a certain form of this subtle discontent.  

And I love the idea of noticing it, being aware of it, melting it away, and refocusing on the present.

Last night at USV, we hosted the latest of several recent meetups on the “Peer Economy”.  We are in the process of organizing a number of companies and organizations that represent a certain sector of the internet economy in NYC, with an eye towards building a more formal coalition (perhaps in the model of San Francisco’s BayShare) at some point in the future. As is to be expected, we spent the bulk of the discussion trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that ties us all together.   I think there’s a pretty strong thread, but it’s not immediately clear how best to describe it.  So I hereby invite you, the Internet, into the conversation. So, as a thought experiment, how might you describe the common approaches and values between:

• peer-to-peer marketplace platforms like Etsy, Krrb, Skillshare, Shapeways and Zaarly;

• collaborative consumption networks like Airbnb and Carpooling.com;

• crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and LendingClub;

• co-working and education/development spaces like General Assembly and the DUMBO Startup Lab;

• support networks for independent professionals like the Freelancer’s Union;

• communications and media networks like Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud and StackExchange.

At USV, we have a word for all of this, which is simply “networks”.  That’s great and effective as an investment thesis, but it’s actually rather abstract as way of communicating the idea widely.  In Steven Johnson’s recent book Future Perfect, he uses the term “peer network”, which is better but still somewhat problematic (as peer means “pier” to most people and “napster” to others).  And our working description, as you can see, is “peer economy”. Anyway, rather than try to “draw a box” around all of this — we instead attempted to (at Matt Brimer’s suggestion) focus on the center — on the core opportunities, values, and methods that all of these communities believe in and operate around. The ones that stood out to me the most were:

• valuing creativity, self expression & individualism;

• increasing personal freedom through community support;

• creating economic empowerment;

• valuing authenticity and real human connection;

• built on trust (as developed within each community);

• and perhaps my favorite: Andrew Wagner’s “as New York as a slice of pizza”

In my world, I focus a lot on words like “innovation” and “networks” — but I think the thing that really stood out to me about last night’s conversation was the centrality of the human component.  Empowering “real people” to do new and awesome things.  To access new economic opportunities for themselves, while at the same time rediscovering community. The idea that stuck in my head last night is about the “Indie Web” — what’s so interesting about the web and the networks of people on it is that they are at the same time individual & independent AND hyper-connected.  The fact that we’re connected lets us be independent.  It’s almost a paradox. I like the idea that the web makes it possible to be an indie musician, dj or filmmaker, to be an indie craftsperson or manufacturer, an indie journalist, publisher, or even an indie scientist. And what makes most (if not all) of this possible is the ability to be an indie entrepreneur, whether that’s through an open source project, a meetup, a web app, or even a venture-backed company (which is, admittedly, a certain flavor of “indie”).   The point is, that on an open web, we have the unfettered ability to make new things that enable people to do new things.  Which is pretty awesome and exciting.