Angel Investors

A number of USV portfolio companies have emerged out of hackathons, like our portfolio company Dapper which created its hit crypto-collectible game CryptoKitties at a Hackathon in late 2017. So yesterday I headed down to NYC’s City Hall which was hosting the finals of a citywide hackathon competition (called The Hack League) among NYC schools to create the best software applications to make the city better. The final projects were judged by people like the Chief Policy and Data Office (Comptroller’s office); the Chief Analytics Officer (City of NY); the Chief Technology Officer (Mayor’s office); the Executive Director of NYC311 (City of NY) and other folks in city government tasked with a similar mandate. “Hero Foods” app that delivers nutritious lunches to students with special needs (financial or health) High school Winners: 1st:

USV backs trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. What excites us about whats happening in healthcare: 1) tech + humans: data powered humans=better decisions than either data or humans alone 2) broaden access by increasing value & decreasing cost of care 3) outcome orientation: not just care, better delivered, but better care— Rebecca Kaden (@rebeccak46) They make birth control and other important prescriptions and home testing kits available to millions of people who have found them difficult to obtain through traditional channels.

One evening last week my daughter and I spent an hour with a team from our portfolio company Pilot Fiber who were pulling a new fiber cable from Sixth Avenue to Fifth Avenue along a cross street in lower Manhattan. The team uses a thin line of “mule tape” that is placed in the conduit between the manhole and the building to pull the fiber cable from the manhole to the building. The team runs fiber using the mule tape in the conduits that exist from manhole to manhole. You can see a line of mule tape on the lower right of the photo above that the team was using to pull the fiber cable from one manhole to the other.

When a company files for an IPO, I like to think if there is a publicly traded company that looks a lot like that company and if so, I lik to run some numbers comparing the two. We can compare Uber’s numbers to recently public Lyft, which I blogged about earlier in this S1 Fun series. Here are Uber’s profit and loss numbers from their S1: We can compare this to Lyft’s profit and loss from my prior blog post: What you can see from this is that Uber is 4-5x larger than Lyft, growing a lot more slowly, has slightly better gross margins, and both are still losing a lot of money but both are moving towards getting profitable on operations in a few years.

I saw some chatter on Twitter this past week about Netflix and Disney in the wake of Disney’s announcement of Disney+: Disney’s stock was up 11% on the week And It is the frustrations of the prior model (interruptive advertising, by appointment consumption, etc) that open the opportunity for the next model Given that the new model, streaming, is well entrenched now, I am not saying that functionality alone will save Netflix or anyone else. But I do believe that the functionality of a service (no ads, binge watching, user interface, curation, notifications, price, etc) are just as important, or possibly more important, than whether or not you can watch The Incredibles on it. So if you are working on a new model, for anything (it could be crypto, health care, education, finance, etc, etc), you should look very closely at what are the most annoying and frustrating aspects of the current model and focus on leading with features that remove them.

And now a word from your sponsor: Coinbase is a USV portfolio company, I am on the board, and I am deeply invested in this business. Coinbase’s regulated custody subsidiary is an important part of their overall business and I am also on the board of it. This Unconfirmed Podcast with Sam McIngvale is a really good explanation of what Coinbase is doing in the custody market and how they are developing new income earning options for their customers.

Plenty of new spots have popped up while we were gone. I love walking the streets and seeing what’s new

Formlabs Digital Factory is happening on May 7th, 2019. If you are into 3D printers, this is shaping up to be a key event of 2019

Our portfolio company Blockstack tweeted out this today: After rounds of private comments, we’ve publicly filed for a $50M token offering with the SEC. Upon qualification, our network and the Stacks tokens will be available to retail investors, including the US. https://t.co/OuPVbA4eJt— Muneeb Ali (@muneeb) April 11, 2019 Given that USV is an investor and one of my partners is on the board, I don’t want to opine on this in any way. But I do think this is an interesting development in the evolution of tokens as investable assets.

The Future Perfect was open in 2003 showcasing furniture designer editions. The gallery has continued to grow into something unique