Startup Reading List

As we get to that time of the year when we look back and take measure of 2020, it will be one for the ages, and not in a good way.

Dan Frommer, who many of you likely know from his writing at Recode, Quartz, Business Insider and other places on the web, has teamed up with my friends at Coefficient Capital to create a 120 page report called Consumer Trends 2021.

It’s winter in NYC now and I am reminded of all the apartments the Gotham Gal and I lived in during our 20s and 30s in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The typical heating system was hot water or steam-powered radiators that clanged all night long and had two settings, on and off. Sometimes the handle wouldn’t work and you could not turn them off. So we would open the windows to manage the temperature in the apartment. I am certain that much of NYC apartment living still works this way in 2020.

This is a theme I have come back to many times over the last decade but in the wake of all of the headlines about high profile founders, VCs, and companies leaving the bay area, I thought I would return to it.

A few years ago, maybe in 2016, we held a discussion of blockchain and crypto technologies at the annual meeting of our limited partners. I recall someone in the audience suggesting that the NYSE and Nasdaq could rebuild their markets on top of these technologies. I replied that I thought it was more likely that new markets built on blockchains and existing for crypto assets would emerge to compete with them.

Shuggie’s is a restaurant that makes pizza out of food waste. Trash Pie. You got to love that. “Helping the planet can be super tasty.”

In the wake of the news yesterday that the FTC plus 46 states and a few other locales sued Facebook for being a monopoly, I want to, yet again, argue for a different, more modern, and more powerful regulatory approach to tech monopolies. I first posted this a year and a half ago, and have reposted it at least once since.

Michelle Zatlyn is the co-founder and COO of our former portfolio and now public company Cloudflare (NYSE: NET). In this conversation she did with the Gotham Gal a few weeks ago, she talks about how she and her co-founder Matthew decided to work on cybersecurity versus many other ideas they had. I love that they had the “would I be proud to work on this?” test. Michelle explained that “making the Internet safer for businesses to operate on” passed that test and that’s what got them to start Cloudflare.

When people ask me why I prefer to invest in software-based innovation vs other important areas like biotech, hardware, energy, etc, I always point to the speed at which software can be built, released, and iterated on.

E-Rate is a program put in place in the 1996 Telecommunications Act to expand Universal Service Fund fees to schools in order to help them upgrade their telecom infrastructure. Telcos charge customers Universal Service Fund fees so that they can provide “universal service”, originally aimed at rural and other locations that were/are not profitable to service otherwise.

I saw this project as I was browsing Kickstarter this morning and I watched the video and thought “I need to get one of those.”

I have written about stablecoins a bunch here at AVC. I believe cryptocurrencies that are not highly volatile are important for use cases like e-commerce. I explained why here.

It is very typical that options and RSUs that are issued to new employees upon joining a company will have “one year cliff vesting.” This means that the first year of vesting into your options or RSUs will not happen until you have completed one entire year. After that vesting usually happens quarterly or monthly.

I’m not much for the shopping mania that happens on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but I do like the idea of taking a day at this time of year to give back. Today is that day.

We learned last week that the US Treasury wants to regulate crypto wallets like bank accounts. On the surface, one can understand that temptation. If people store, send, receive, and sell crypto assets in crypto wallets, then surely they should be regulated like bank accounts.

I learned yesterday of the passing of Arnold Waldstein. Arnold was as regular a reader of this blog as there ever was or ever will be. His warmth is what I will remember most. He cared about people.

I’ve been biking several times a week in NYC this fall and every mask I’ve worn has caused me problems with fogging my glasses and making it harder to breath. I’ve tried a bunch of different masks and nothing works great.

As years go, 2020 is not one that generates a lot of gratitude in my mind. Global pandemic, racial struggles, millions without jobs, local merchants closing up, a surreal election here in the US, and that is just what comes to mind in the time it takes me to write this.

I have New York State’s exposure alerting app on my phone and check it every day. It gives me great statistics about what is going on in my location. You can download it here for iOS and Android.

@fdestin @MacConwell @HarryStebbings any VC 'fairy godfathers of success' viewpoints?"Building a solid business, but the V.C.s wanted fantasy….the hope that one lucky wager would more than offset many bad bets." #startups @fredwilson blog fodderhttps://t.co/OossQ5MZjC

There are many ways to invest successfully. Public stocks, bonds, private equity, real estate, venture capital, etc. And within each category, there are so many different investment opportunities.

I was on a zoom board meeting in early July and one of the board members started whipping out cards instead of interrupting. I captured the moment because I thought it was awesome.

The latest charade of bringing Jack and Zuck in front of Congress to yell at them reminds me that our elected officials and regulators don’t have a plan for how to properly regulate social media. Jack and Zuck probably do have a plan and if they play their cards correctly, they will be able to use regulations to lock in their dominance for many many years to come. That should scare us all.

When I go back and read my Jan 1st post on what would happen in the 2020s, I am reminded how hard it is to predict the future. The Covid Pandemic changed everything in 2020 and likely for years to come. And yet it was not one of my predictions, even though Covid was already spreading in China at the time I wrote it.

Hi Fred, do you have any suggestion for good primers/book explaining cryptocurrencies a bit better to the inexperienced and uninitiated?