Craft
Four works of art that show attention to craft, from peculiar artists, with particular takes. All recommended if that sounds interesting.
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One Good
I started to get dizzy in January 2023. It began with ringing in my ears after attending a loud concert and gradually worsened. Some days, it was debilitating, almost like being on a spinning ride. Other days, it felt more like being on a constantly rocking boat. They called it vertigo, and when doctors use that term, they take it seriously and subject you to numerous tests to determine the cause.…
We Made A Movie (or: Welcome To My Torment)
Right before the holidays we made a film. We wanted to do something special at USV's year-end event to celebrate a milestone . We asked friends of the firm to record videos marking the event. These would be simply strung together to watch. When the videos started arriving five days before the event, we realized we were about to sit through something like a wedding video on an oversized TV at a…
What Time Does The Bus Come?
Did you ever wake up to find A day that broke up your mind Destroyed your notion of circular time When one of our kids was young, we discovered a medical condition that required years of visits to dozens of medical professionals, hundreds of tests, and many more phone calls and emails. My wife Susan took copious handwritten notes of these sessions. It was natural for her, as an English lit major…
Delusions
"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true?" Back in college, a few friends were studying in the UK. One night they walked into a pub, saw a bar-band playing and fell in love. They made excited calls back to us in the States; they mailed cassettes of the band playing, the handwritten setlists filled with exclamation marks. A plan was hatched. We knew nothing about anything but were avid readers of…
On art and business and context and mirrors
Jean-Michel Basquiat - Untitled, 1981 Estimated value $300,000-400,000 1/ It used to be that value could be determined by scarcity. The less of something, the harder it was to get, the more it was worth for you to get it. Maybe even the value of a piece of something (art? content?) was more related to the scarcity of its distribution than it was to any measure of value. In equation form, we could…
You'll Figure It Out
I'm sure we're taller in another dimension You say we're smaller and not worth the mention - Frank Ocean When I worked at AOL, we typically worked from 8am until 9 or 10pm. At the end of every day, we'd congregate in the office of our boss , to sit around and bullshit and catch up on email and talk about deals we were working on and issues in those we were facing. One evening we were doing this,…
Get No (perceptions of user experience)
I attended a "progressive" (read: hippie) school on the Upper West Side called Walden. In 2nd or 3rd grade, our teacher Gloria pulled out a record player every morning and let us dance around, I'm sure as a way to help burn off the energy of a large group of seven-year-olds. She played the same song for us, every day, at the same time. The song's chorus was "Get No" and we would shout and dance…
Everything about venture capital . . . you can learn from music lyrics
Here I go, it's my shot, feet fail me not This might be the only opportunity I got As I get older, I find that I need to give myself mental tricks to remember ideas or concepts. A few weeks ago I gave a brief presentation at a USV offsite that uses music lyrics to cover some of the concepts about venture capital that I think about often. My first draft was much longer - 70 or 80 slides. The final…
What Do You Think?
The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway -Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test In the mid-90s I worked for a man whose management style we used to call Mentor/Tormentor. He would give us - junior, barely experienced businesspeople - complicated yet wildly…
Ghosts and Ancestors
People will tell you where they've gone They'll tell you where to go But till you get there yourself You never really know -Joni Mitchell Towards the end of his Broadway show, Bruce Springsteen describes how he’s realized that as parents, we have a choice to make: will we be ghosts or ancestors to our children. As ghosts, we haunt them with our mistakes and burdens; as ancestors, we free them from…
Control
What is the future that will unfold? Some like it hot , others like it cold But we all want to hold the remote control -Beastie Boys Sometimes a service provides a value to its customers that may not be readily apparent at first glance. And sometimes that value can be more fundamentally important to those customers that the actual “widget” that is being sold. Netflix is a good example. Their…
Addition by Subtraction
“Dangerfield eliminated everything from his act but the setups and punchlines” Alex Halberstadt’s essay on Rodney Dangerfield is a masterclass on how to improve by reduction. Dangerfield worked for decades as a comedian until he figured out the thing, his insight: “by eliminating every extraneous element, you could isolate what makes it work and just do that.” Dangerfield reduced his act to just…
Dreams
If dreams came true, oh wouldn’t that be nice Most of my sleep dreams are mundane if I can even remember them. The other night I dreamt that I missed a flight to Toronto because I didn’t have my passport. There are other dreams that are more profound. Those are the dreams of one's life - how it turned out, how you wanted it to turn out. We often evaluate our life based on its relation to those…
The Future and the Process
"People are often asking me what’s going to happen next in science that’s important, and of course, the whole point is that if it’s important, it’s something we didn’t expect. All the really important things come as a big surprise." - Freeman Dyson Uncertainty about the world, desire to control our destinies, maturation - all make us want to understand what’s going to happen in the future.…
The Riff
Today we have have posted The Riff #1 to Soundcloud (and soon to iTunes , Google Play and other places I suppose). The Riff is a 24 minute, unedited single conversation about one topic with one person who knows something about that topic (ie, a riff). David Tisch and I are the interviewers. We conceived of this idea and after a few months of planning we have started to put these into the wild. A…
People
Much ado is all I see And feel like it's surrounding me The crowd intrudes all day 'Til I'm finally swept away A few weeks ago I had the extreme privilege of going to a meeting in Washington, D.C. at a building called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This the building that houses the offices of the executive branch of the United States government. It is a great old building the majesty of…
The Reordering of Medicine
When you wake up in the morning You'll have a brand new feeling And you'll find yourself healing -Daniel Johnston The nature of the way we interact - or desire to interact - with medicine and our medical care is starting to change fundamentally. This is less about the unbundling of medicine (which may also be happening) but instead the reordering of it. Stemming from a combination of user desires…
Bots, Messaging and SmarterChild
If I gave you my love, I tell you what I'd do I'd expect a whole lot of love out of you - Al Green Smart people believe that messenger type interfaces and associated “bots” will become a primary way people access new services going forward. We at USV certainly find truth in that, see both Kik and Koko and Libov’s thoughts here . There are a bunch of reasons why this could be the case. First, the…
Somewhere In The Middle
Change, nothing stays the same - Van Halen 2015 was in some ways the year that the science of gene editing - or Crispr - came into the public consciousness. As part of that, large incumbent players made big moves. For example, this joint venture involving Bayer (a $40B company). There were other examples of the “incumbents” in the health and medicine space making significant investments into…
No Stack Startups
“Who can unlearn all the facts that I've learned” One way of looking at a publisher’s chain of business operations is that there are five core things it must do: (1) produce content; (2) market/promote content; (3) distribution; (4) figure out the best user interface or experience for its content; (5) and monetize the business. This applies, really, to any publisher: both content and commerce, for…
Changing Metaphors
"Photograph - all I've got is a photograph. But it's not enough" Def Leppard Wikipedia tells us that the word "photograph" derives from the Greek words phos and graphê , together meaning "drawing with light." I suppose that for a hundred or so years that general definition worked as a metaphor to describe a new technology and medium and what could be done with it, whether that be still, animated…
The Chaos Theory Of Startups
"Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there" - Ken Kesey I was flying from NY to SF the other day and at one point the gentleman I was sitting next to asked me if I was flying towards or away from home. I told him NYC was my home and I was on a business trip. He then said, "let me guess, Internet business." I was momentarily self conscious (was it…
Looking More Closely
I was talking when I should have been listening - Grant Hart As venture investors, we look at our investments and investment strategy continuously at a macro level. Questions like: how much are we investing and how fast? How does that compare to our other funds? What are our ownership levels and how are those changing? We run Monte Carlo simulations regularly to analyze the future capital…
Experience
God, what a mess, on the ladder of success Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung - Paul Westerberg I was in a board meeting the other day at a company we have been investors in for a bunch of years. It is run by a small, great group of people, who built a good social product that did reasonably well - many users - but never broke out and achieved those hyper growth rates associated…