Fred Wilson

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.