AVC
Sep 26 6:21am
On Saturday, September 9th, the Gotham Gal and I arrived at JFK airport after an eight-hour flight from Paris. While waiting for our luggage, I got pushed a notification in my web3 wallet that there was an NFT drop underway that I could participate in. So I clicked on the link, signed the transaction, and […]
Aug 28 5:58am
I’ve written about this topic before. It is an important topic and I want to raise it again. Boards often discuss CEO performance without really knowing how things work inside the company. And CEOs often have very little visibility to how they are doing and what the board thinks about their performance. When you work […]
Aug 23 5:17am
For many years, there were three ways to subscribe to AVC: 1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox 2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader 3/ X – Follow AVC on X X revoked the API access that I was using to autopost three or four months ago. […]
Aug 13 6:18am
I got a new Pixel 7 last week and have started the tedious process of moving over to a new phone. One of the more painful chores in moving from one phone to another is moving the Google Authenticator app and all of the two factor codes to the new phone. My partner Nick told […]
Aug 6 5:12am
USV has been an investor in the Helium network since 2019. I have always loved the idea of using web3 technologies to let consumers to “peer produce” a communications network creating a people-powered network. Helium started out powering communications between low-power “Internet of Things (IOT)” devices but with the introduction of Helium Mobile back in […]
Jul 30 5:19am
I’ve written about this topic a bunch over the years. It is something I’ve been interested in for quite a while. Our homes are filled with big hunks of plastic hanging on the wall that are off most of the time. They look like this: Now that’s a lovely scene. Some nice plants. A cool […]
Jul 26 6:05am
The New York Times had a piece yesterday suggesting that tech will no longer be a growth engine for NYC and the surrounding metro area as it has been for the last twenty years. I am not going to link to the piece because it is behind a paywall but if you want to read […]
Brad Feld
Jul 17 9:16am
I recently wrote the Foreword for Unshackled, a new book co-authored by Soundarya Basubramani, a writer from India, and Sameer Khedekar, a veteran immigration lawyer. Unshackled breaks down how legal immigration works in America in a way that is friendly, accessible, and human. It’s filled with raw stories of high-skilled immigrants who walked unconventional paths […]
The post Book: Unshackled: A Practical Guide For Highly-Skilled Immigrants To Thrive In The United States appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jul 17 4:29am
The venture capital sector has been in a sustained downturn for almost eighteen months. How does this downturn end? Well, it may have already ended, but let’s see about that. We will know for sure in a few quarters. The NASDAQ peaked at roughly 16,000 in November 2021. By June 2022, it was down 33%. […]
Jul 12 4:43am
I spent a good part of my childhood at West Point, the US Military Academy. I got an email yesterday with photos of the flooding at West Point. My dad and brother used to work in that grey stone building called Mahan Hall. And the same storms that did this to West Point did worse […]
Jul 7 5:19am
Like tens of millions of others, I downloaded Threads onto my phone yesterday and signed up. The thing that Twitter has been missing since it killed off its ecosystem over a decade ago is competition. And as we all know, lack of competition is a very bad thing. In governments and in products. Competition keeps […]
Jul 3 5:22am
EV sales in the US are on the rise, reaching 7% of all car sales in Q1 2023, up from 4.6% a year earlier. If that rate of growth continues, EVs will be 10% of the US car market by next year. Most people who own an EV charge it at home, using an EV […]
Brad Feld
Jun 30 9:18am
Alan Arkin is one of my favorite actors. I just saw a note that he passed away yesterday. I expect I’ll look like him when I lose my hair since he looks like my dad. And every time I see Alan Arkin, I think of my dad. If you see me driving my Jeep around […]
The post RIP Alan Arkin appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
Jun 26 5:08am
The term “censorship resistant” is used a lot in the decentralized computing/web3/crypto space to talk about a core feature of these systems. I don’t love the term censorship resistant because it is a wonky term. Software that is encoded in smart contracts (and other ways) on fully decentralized blockchains can’t be shut down or turned […]
Jun 18 5:54am
Smartphones have had voice input for over a decade now and yet I don’t know that many people who use voice input regularly. I would guess that maybe 10 to 20% of smartphone users are using voice input regularly. That’s a guess based on absolutely no data other than observing friends, family, and colleagues. However, […]
Jun 13 1:26pm
The last time I posted was May 23rd, three weeks ago. There was a time when I wrote every day. When I had not yet posted on any day, I felt like something was missing, like I had not yet had my cup of coffee. Clearly, I have moved on from that need to write […]
Brad Feld
Jun 1 7:36am
The Venture Deals course is free and starts on June 20, 2023. This is the fourth time we are running the new version of the course (v2!) that was co-created with Techstars and Kauffman Fellows. If interested, sign up now. I hope to see you in one of the AMAs we will host for anyone who takes the […]
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AVC
May 23 6:08am
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 landed me in public testimony in front of the DFS staff. In my testimony, I explained to the DFS staff that the difference […]
Brad Feld
May 21 12:03pm
John McPhee’s Levels of the Game was published when I was three. I’ve read many books about tennis, but it’s still my favorite, with String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis coming in a close second. Both books share extraordinary writers and a topic I can relate to, given my short but profane junior tennis […]
The post Book: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process appeared first on Brad Feld.
AVC
May 19 5:55am
This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition. This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird Labs, which I posted about a few months ago. Blackbird is a platform for the […]
Brad Feld
May 10 9:57am
I got an email from Matt Blumberg this morning with the above image that said, “We have been blogging for 19 years. I can remember sitting together above Super Liquor futzing with Typepad like it was yesterday.” “Super Liquor” is Superior Liquor in Superior, Colorado, which was on the first floor of the building off […]
The post 19 Years Ago Today appeared first on Brad Feld.
May 8 8:44am
Startup Snapshot, a data-sharing platform for the entrepreneurial ecosystem, recently released its latest report, The Untold Toll: The Impact of stress on the well-being of startup founders and CEOs. Clearly, the emotional state of founders and entrepreneurs in any period, especially now in this economic environment, is a critical driver of success. Yet the emotional, cognitive, […]
The post The Impact of Stress on the Well-being of Startup Founders and CEOs appeared first on Brad Feld.
Apr 28 11:56am
I’m not a sports fan, but wow, this is good.
The post It’s Not A Failure – It’s Steps to Success appeared first on Brad Feld.
Apr 26 5:16am
Chris Heivly released Build the Fort: The Startup Community Builder’s Field Guide. I encourage you to get Chris’s book if you are a startup community builder or are interested in startup communities. When Ian Hathaway and I started working on The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, we initially talked to Chris about writing […]
The post Book: Build the Fort: The Startup Community Builder’s Field Guide appeared first on Brad Feld.
Apr 20 6:35am
After my post about the Founder Mental Health Pledge, I received a note from Kari Palazzari, the Executive Director of Studio Arts Boulder, a local nonprofit that manages a community pottery studio. She lamented that very few members of the Boulder startup community seem to take advantage of their programs. She said, “Studio Arts Boulder […]
The post Pottery and Mental Health for Entrepreneurs in Boulder appeared first on Brad Feld.