It’s 2020. Time to look forward to the decade that is upon us. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Bill Gates, is that people overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will...

Dan Primack wrote in his friday newsletter: Public market investors have become less willing to leave their comfort zones, and it’s manifesting most obviously in the IPO market.Novel disruption has...

We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons: Seed stage is when a company has a good team, a good idea, but has not...

I have worked in three venture capital firms in the thirty-six years I have been doing venture capital investing. They have all been small partnerships, between three and seven investing partners,...

There is a lot of negativity around NYC right now. Bloggers writing sensational headlines. That sort of thing. It makes me want to go out and buy a ton of NYC stock right now. It is certainly the...

As we enter 2024, the capital markets have found their footing and are moving higher. The Fed has taken interest rates as far as they want at this ti...

I want to focus this post on the macro environment for tech, startups, web3, and climate because that is where my head is at right now. I believe that sometime in the first half of 2023, the central...

Back in 2014, USV got subpoenaed by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) over our web3 investing activities. We hired a law firm, answered the subpoena, and that ultimately...

The last six months have been a challenging time for tech and tech startups. Macro events have weighed on the sector, valuations have come crashing down, revenue growth has slowed (or stopped), and...

The Pivot is celebrated in startup land. Huge successes like Twitter and Slack are all the results of pivots. So surely pivoting is a good thing, right? Well, I am not so sure. And I certainly don’t...

Back in February of last year, I wrote a blog post with the same title and said this about the asset price bubble we were living in and investing in over the last few years: The big question is how...

Many founders want to do SAFE note financings for their early rounds to save time and money. My response to that is “let’s do a priced round, we can use a standard financing form we both like, we...

This is a topic of great importance and one that we in the tech/startup sector have not done a good job with. We wait until a company is ready to go public and then address it. While that is better...

I am sitting in the airport lounge in Geneva waiting to board an airplane. I am here because yesterday was the inaugural Libra Association member council meeting. The Libra Association is a Swiss...

I saw Dan Primack assert that the venture capitalist’s customer is their limited partners in this tweet about the Citizen app, the recap, and their VCs: I DM’d Dan to let him know that is not the...

Welcome to the new AVC. This is the third “iteration” of this blog. The first iteration (AVC 1.0) was the Typepad era during which I redesigned AVC a number of times using Typepad’s tools. That...

My friend Steve Kane suggested I take a longer view in my pair of year end posts this year: What, no decade end/decade ahead posts? 😕 — Steven Kane (@stevenkane) December 26, 2019 And so I will....

Our friend Benedict Evans posted his annual “macro trends” deck this weekend. You can also download the PDF here. In the deck, Benedict poses the question “what is the next S-Curve?” And while he...

It is tempting to search for the one magic move that will make everything better. A new VP of Sales. A new database layer in your tech stack. A new brand for your company. Moving everything to the...

Syndicating an early stage investment is a time honored practice in the venture capital business. It was extremely common in the VC business in the early 80s when I started. I assume syndicating was...

Over the last month, there has been a ton of debate and conversation about web2 vs web3 with many leading voices raising doubts about web3. Debate and doubt are healthy. And web3 enthusiasts,...

Two years ago this weekend, the Gotham Gal and I were in Park City at the annual Sundance Film Festival with another couple we have been great friends with for thirty years. On Monday morning we came...

One of the hardest things in managing a venture capital portfolio is managing your big winners. A big winner can dwarf the rest of the entire portfolio and you end up sitting on enormous paper...

I got an email from the CEO of one of our portfolio companies last week. It asked a very basic question, but one that I don’t recall being asked before: I need to know if any of your LPs include ...

My dad, General Robert Maris Wilson, or Bob as most people called him, passed away on Monday at the age of 92. He had been in failing health for the last few months and moved on peacefully. My dad...

One of the many things that venture capital has taught me is the value of the long buy. What I mean by a “long buy” is buying shares in a company over a long period of time. We have investments where...

There is an obsession with the values that are being placed on companies when they finance. There has always been one but it is worse than ever. Every day, without fail, I read a headline that so and...

I am a fan of the slow and steady approach to building a business. I call it “crawl, walk, run.” I have seen many founders try the “run right away” approach and it is super hard to make that work. An...

My partner Brad likes to ask about the distinction between doing things right and doing the right thing. His observation, which I totally agree with, is that many people and companies do things right...

Thirteen years ago, USV invested in the Kik, the company behind the popular messaging app of the same name, and I joined the Board. That set me off o...

For the last ten years, my tax prep on crypto was pretty easy. I have always had a buy and hold mindset and have custodied with Coinbase. So a simple report on Coinbase was all I needed to send to my...

There has been this narrative about investing in VC funds that you have to get into the top quartile (25%) or possibly the top decile (10%) in order to generate good returns. I have heard that for as...

Hi Everyone. Happy 2021. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It...

Now that we are beginning to see what consumer applications are like in the decentralized web (web3), it is interesting to compare that to what consumer applications are like in the centralized web...

Today is a tough day in the financial markets. Who knows where we will end up at the end of the day, the week, or this month. We’ve already seen the major indexes give up around 20% of their value in...

Earlier this week I purchased 1% of a collection of five 1985 Nike Air Jordan sneakers using our portfolio company Otis’ mobile app. I paid $330 for ten shares (out of a total of 1000 shares)...

2007 was a heady time for USV. Web2 was finally happening, four years after Brad and I spent 18 months telling the world it was coming to mostly deaf...

We’ve been watching the ESPN series The Last Dance along with something like 6mm other fans who are watching it right now. It is a reminder of how dominant Michael Jordan was in the 90s and what a...

We were hanging out with friends last night and one of them asked me how many investments I have made this year. I replied “one so far.” He said, “you are not very active.” and I replied “I do one to...

A number of people have been asking me what I think of the Game Stop situation. This is not really my world. I don’t trade stocks, we hold them. I don’t use Robinhood, though I have an account thanks...

Most venture capital investments are made, over time, by syndicates. This means a group of venture capital firms develops around a company, usually built over multiples rounds. Some of the firms in...

I wrote the email below to a founder doing his first board meeting. Board meetings can provide a leadership team with a perspective on the business t...

I wrote a fair bit last year about the disconnect between how companies were being valued and the fundamentals of those businesses. It seemed to me that many companies, from the founders, to the...

I am returning to a theme that I feel quite strongly about. I blog on WordPress using a host that I have selected and can move from at any time. WordPress is open source software and I can download...

A number of friends have been asking us how to buy crypto assets. This is not the first time we’ve gotten this question and it won’t be the last. When I first started getting this question, my answer...

While Bitcoin is the gold standard in crypto, Ethereum has been the innovator, bringing new ideas, particularly smart contracts, to the table. Smart contracts allow developers to easily build things...

Last night I picked up my phone after a long and fun dinner party and saw that the Golden State Warriors had signed Boogie Cousins (one of the most talented big men in the NBA) to a one year mid...

In her decision last week on the Epic vs Apple case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote this: I am not a lawyer, but I read that to say that apps that use crypto rails for payments cannot be blocked...

As many of you know, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are all the rage on wall street right now. SPACs are publicly traded “shell companies” that raise capital in an IPO process and then...

We are in the middle of one of the great asset bubbles of modern times. It has been brought on by the easy money policies of central banks around the world aimed at weathering the global Covid 19...

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...

I woke up to a dream this morning where I was playing a game that was very similar to Turntable.fm, a failed effort to create a social music experience that had a moment back in 2011 and that I had...

The Gotham Gal and I met when we were 19 and got married when we were 25. We lived together for most of those six years before we got married. By the time we tied the knot, we knew each other very...

On Friday, the US jobs report produced a confusing result. From Bloomberg: The jobs report is composed of two surveys — one of employers and the other of households. The employer survey, which...

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending and one looking forward to the year ahead. This is the first of these two posts. The second one will...

I wrote about pacing a few years ago. I am a fan of a steady pace, not too fast, not too slow. Sometimes the opportunity set forces you to go faster. As I wrote then: I don’t think a VC firm should...

I’m in Canada today to attend a board meeting. I love Canada. It’s a kindler gentler more welcoming version of the US. And it’s increasingly an important place to be for the tech sector. About 10% of...

This post was co-written by Katie Haun and Fred Wilson The events surrounding FTX have shaken the confidence of many. How did one of the largest crypto exchanges collapse so quickly? Why do meltdowns...

While we wait for the blockchain/crypto technology to scale to the point where it can be the foundation of mainstream consumer applications (games, social media, e-commerce, etc), there is a sector...

One of the gifts that I got was the ability to stay positive. I am grateful to my parents, my wife, and my genes (and anyone else responsible too). It is such a superpower. I don’t just mean optimi...

Apple and Google’s duopoly on mobile operating systems give those two companies incredible power in the market and one of the most obvious places to see that power is the 30% tax they take on...

The advances in AI over the last year are mind-boggling. I attended a dinner this past week with USV portfolio founders and one who works in education told us that ChatGPT has effectively ended the...

When I was in my early 20s, I had a conversation with my dad. I told him I was against nuclear power because it was dangerous and because it created radioactive waste that we had no idea how to...

A friend and I dined last night at a restaurant that opened in our neighborhood last summer, in the middle of the pandemic. For the first six months of its existence, they could not welcome diners...

One of the silver linings to this awful pandemic is that things have slowed down a lot. Not just work. Everything really. I find myself taking more time to do the dishes, work out, meditate, etc....

I was talking to my friend Simon yesterday and he observed that the essential skill of entrepreneurs and early stage VCs is to “be able to see through the fog of an emerging market and pick out the...