Chris Dixon, who leads the A16Z crypto fund, and has been an entrepreneur, VC, and friend of mine for over twenty years, has written a book called Read Write Own that is available for pre-order now and will start shipping at the end of the month. Chris gave me a copy right before the holidays and I read it over the last week. I asked Chris why he wrote the book and he had two answers, one personal and one practical. The personal one is “I have focused my career on investing in blockchain networks. During the recent downturn, I felt a need to rearticulate to myself why I am doing that.”  T ..read more

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 nothing happened (or so I thought). So I tried again. Again nothing happened. Frustrated, I turned my attention to the luggage, retrieved it, got in a car, and headed home. On the way home, I tried again a few times to no avail. It turns out that each of my failed attempts to mint an NFT was ..read more

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. I have not been active on that service for almost a year now and have no interest in dealing with it. So if you are one of the 25.5k followers on X and want to keep getting alerted when I post, I suggest you go with option 1 or option 2 going forward. There is also a new third option that I will talk about at the end of this post. If y ..read more

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 May, they are now powering a cell phone network. My friend Stephen started using Helium Mobile last month and so I decided to join him. I signed up for Helium Mobile yesterday ($25/month but free during the beta period) and added it as a secon ..read more

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 wood cabinet. A nice lamp. A few books. And a piece of black plastic. Here’s what our family room looks like when we are not watching the TV: That’s a Sony TV with nothing special in it. I have done some work to make the art run on it, but that work is getting easier and easier. I’ve been playing around with this ..read more

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 off. So why is this a big deal? Let’s make up a story: Imagine that an AI is trained to teach children to read better than humans. But the powers that be decide that teaching children to read is something that humans need to do. So they make this AI illegal and ..read more

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 between the US and China is that the US respects the freedom to innovate: REMINDER: ANYTHING THAT CHINA BANS, INVEST IN!@fredwilson @cameron @tyler @BarrySilbert @Winter #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/LGtDYef7U7 — Mr.Buidl (@MrBUIDL) May 21, 2021 I was reminded of that moment yesterday ..read more

USV’s current thesis is: Enabling trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. https://www.usv.com/#thesis-3-0 That last word is powerful but unfortunately less understood than the other words in that sentence. Protocols have been around forever and are well-understood codes of conduct between people. In computer science, protocols are the same thing, codes of conduct. I like this definition of computer protocols from the Cloudflare website: Standardized protocols are like a common language that computers can use ..read more

The first project launched this week on our portfolio company Blackbird‘s platform. It is a friends and family program at a restaurant in Williamsburg Brooklyn called Gertie. Blackbird wrote about it today on their excellent Supersonic blog: Throughout, when you tap Gertie’s Blackbird-powered NFC chip (shown above), wonder awaits. On the first tap, a free cookie sourced from a nearby bakery comes your way. On the second, coffee is on the house. Over time, one-size-fits-many freebies give way to the kinds of perks you’d expect as a regular, like a personalized coffee mug that is always at the ..read more

When a new technology comes to market, we often look for “native” applications of that technology. What is a “native” AI application? What is a “native” Web3 application? I have not seen a better articulation of “native” than my partner Albert’s post from 2009 on native mobile applications. He started out by laying out the new primitives that mobile smartphones made available to developers. In the case of mobile, he cited: Location Proximity Touch Audio Input Video Input He then went on to say that it would be the combination of these primitives, more than any individual one, that would make ..read more