Startup Reading

TPP stands for Trans Pacific Partnership, a far reaching free trade deal that US and our Asian trading partners have been working on for years. The TPP was in the news yesterday because Hillary Clinton came out and said that, in its current form, she cannot support TPP.

I think this is a big deal for first time and casual users of Twitter. It's an easier way to consume the content in Twitter for people who don't have the time or inclination to customize Twitter to work for them the way many of us have.

Kickstarter, the UN, and the White House are launching something important this morning. It is called Aid Refugees and its an attempt to leverage the power of the leading crowdfunding community to raise funds to deal with the global refugee crisis.

I've written about NYU and Poly here on AVC a few times, most recently when I gave a commencement speech earlier this year. Poly is one of the great successes in NYC over the past ten years. In 2005, it was a struggling engineering school in downtown Brooklyn and NYU hadn't had an engineering school since the mid 1970s.

At USV, we've been investing in European startups since 2008. Currently 22% of our active portfolio is in Europe. Since 2010, we've invested in 47 companies (roughly 8 per year) and 11 of them have been in Europe (roughly 2 per year). So over the past six years, roughly 25% of our investments have been in Europe.

Our portfolio company YouNow is a broadcasting app that tends to be used by entertainers, youtubers, and young people in general. While not as well known as Periscope, it's users are super into it and highly engaged.

A couple days ago Jay Rosen reached out to me on Twitter asking if he could do a guest post on AVC: @jayrosen_nyu Not normally. Why? - Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) September 29, 2015 I really don't like guest posts.

For something like 30 years, we have been hearing about trickle down economics in which we lower tax and other burdens on the wealthy, these wealthy individuals invest in the economy, and the benefits of those investments "trickle down" to the middle and lower class.

comScore released a mobile web/app report last week that is very insightful. The data is US only so it is skewed in that respect and many interesting things are happening outside of the US and the report misses them. But regardless, there are some important conclusions from the report and the title of this blog post is the biggest of them.

You can slash foursquare, soundcloud, youtube, spotify, and many other resources to help you quickly send web content and other stuff around.

This talk by Maciej Ceglowski (the founder of Pinboard among other things) is mostly a discussion of ad:tech and privacy issues. It raises a number of interesting points and echoes a view of ad blockers that my partner Albert has convinced me is correct (that they are a logical extension of the user agent concept embedded in web browsers).

In the White House's Broadband Report, released yesterday, it states: At the same time, limited competition is also a challenge even in communities with high rates of adoption. Today, nearly 40 percent of American households either do not have the option of purchasing a wired 10 Mbps connection or they must buy it from a single provider.

Back in 2011, USV invested in Chris Poole's startup Canvas. I worked closely with Chris on that investment and they built something great called DrawQuest. But it did not turn into a sustainable business and eventually Chris shut it down. All through this time, Chris ran and managed 4chan, a service he built and launched when he was 15.

I recall meeting Perry Chen for the first time in the old USV offices on the 14th floor back in 2009 shortly after Kickstarter launched. He and his partners Yancey and Charles were onto something, I was sure of that. But they wanted to do things differently.

I learned to use computers in the era of the "command line interface". It looked like this: I started using computers in the era of mainframes and mini-computers and my first desktop ran MS-DOS which was a command line driven operating system.

One of Bitcoin's strongest voices is Jerry Brito, the Executive Director of Coin Center. This short (~6 min) interview he did with Foreign Affairs is a good example of his balanced and clear and crisp voice on Bitcoin.

I'd like to hear from those of you who have upgraded to iOS9 about the back button. Is it as big of a deal as I think it is?

Yesterday Mayor de Blasio announced Computer Science For All which is a ten year effort to train 4,775 NYC public school teachers on the fundamentals of computer science and how to teach it to their students. The goal of Computer Science For All is to have computer science teachers and classes in every one of the 1,700 NYC public schools within ten years.

As you all know, this is something I've been working on for over five years now. This work has been inspired and supported by so many people who won't be acknowledged and won't be credited today and in the weeks and months to come as this effort gets rolled out.

A week later I am back to the Nexus 6. I just couldn't take all the stuff that comes with the T-Mo phone. The autocomplete was driving me crazy. There are apps on the phone I don't want and don't have the time to figure out how to delete.

CloudFlare wanted to operate its network in China but obviously that created some challenges. So for the past four years CloudFlare has been working with various partners in China to come up with a model that would work.