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HELP US DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO OWN CRYPTO IN AMERICA.

Join a community of 300,000+ people advocating for better crypto policy in
America.







March 27, 2024


THE ANNUAL NYC COMPUTER SCIENCE FAIR



Our family's public charity, Gotham Gives, along with Tech:NYC, puts on the
Annual NYC Computer Science Fair with help from the broader tech community in
NYC.

The Fair happened yesterday at the Armory in Washington Heights.




The Fair brings together about 2000 NYC public high school students who are
studying computer science with about fifty tech companies and about twenty
colleges and dozens of after-school CS programs. It was described to me
yesterday as a "science fair meets a job fair" and that's exactly right.

The idea is to show NYC public school students, many of whom are from families
with no connection to the tech sector, that they are candidates to work in tech
if they take the right classes, work hard, and develop skills that make them
employable.

We have been putting on the Fair since 2013 and even did two virtual fairs
during the pandemic. The in-person ones are a lot better!

I had the pleasure of touring NYC School Chancellor David Banks around the Fair
mid-morning. We stopped at about a dozen booths and rooms and met a bunch of
students, teachers, tech companies, and non-profits working in CS Education.







That's the Chancellor doing a robotics project with some young women from Forest
Hills who compete in a robotics tournament under the name Metro Joules.

My favorite moment of the tour was a visit to the Dream Machine which is a
visual AI experience built by the Bright Moments DAO which is in the USV
portfolio.




That's a student "prompting" the Dream Machine with a story about Spiderman
playing pickup basketball. The students enjoyed coming up with dreams and
prompting the Dream Machine to display them on the big screen. On the way out,
the Chancellor and I discussed how technology like this could be used in helping
students learn.

It gives me great pride and satisfaction that we can put on a day like this for
the students of NYC. It could not happen without the leadership of Jennifer
Klopp, who runs Gotham Gives, and the Tech:NYC team. And we are incredibly
grateful for the financial support of our sponsors; Etsy, Justworks, Warby
Parker, Kickstarter, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Uniswap, SoundCloud, Splice,
Deloitte, Pilot Fiber and Primary VC. And huge thanks to all of the companies,
universities and non-profits that had booths at the Fair this year.

March 18, 2024


STANDWITHCRYPTO.ORG



A recent survey suggests that about 60mm Americans own crypto assets. That's
almost 20% of the country. That's three times as many people as belong to
unions. That is twenty times the number of Americans that own an electric
vehicle.

Crypto holders/advocates should be a potent voting bloc in the US and hopefully
we will see that in this election cycle.

The non-profit StandWithCrypto.org is all about activating the crypto voter.

Almost 400,000 individuals have joined StandWithCrypto, including yours truly,
and I want to encourage all pro-crypto readers of this blog to join me in doing
that.

You can do that by going here and click on "joint the fight."

I've also added a call to action to join StandWithCrypto to the top of this blog
and will keep it there through this November's election and possibly beyond
that.

February 16, 2024


HELIUM MOBILE VS WIFI CALLING



I have been a T-Mobile customer for many years. I switched to T-Mobile back when
they offered "bring your own phone" and ATT and Verizon were not doing the same.
I like companies that let you do things your way.

But T-Mobile does not have great service in several important locations for me,
like our home in NYC, our beach house, and our ski house. So I use wifi calling
on T-Mobile in those locations and it works reasonably well. But it is not
perfect.

I became a Helium Mobile customer last August and wrote about it then. Helium
Mobile is the 5G cellular service offered by our portfolio company Nova Labs
using the Helium hotspot network and backfill via T-Mobile.

And a month or so ago, I bought some of the new Helium Mobile hotspots and
started installing them in our homes and offices. I did this to participate in
the Helium network and earn Mobile token rewards.

However, I realized a fantastic side benefit which is that my second sim (a
downloadable esim) on my phone has way better service when I am near a Helium
Mobile hotspot than what I get using wifi calling on T-Mobile.

I've always thought of Helium as a way of participating in a network and earning
rewards for doing so. But now Helium is also providing "single user utility" in
the form of way better cellular service in locations that don't have that.

So if you live and/or work in a location where you don't get great cell service
and if wifi calling doesn't completely solve that problem for you, trying
signing up for Helium Mobile for $20/month, getting a second sim in your phone,
and putting a Helium Mobile hotspot in that location. It works great for me.







February 9, 2024


ANATOMY OF A TWITTER/X ACCOUNT TAKEOVER HACK



On Tuesday, I had my @fredwilson account taken over.

I haven't used that account for almost eighteen months, but it has almost
700,000 followers and has the potential to do a lot of harm in the wrong hands.

I am writing this to explain what happened so that others might learn from my
mistakes.

On Tuesday at 3:35pm eastern, while I was in a taxi on my way from a doctor
appointment to my home office, I saw this email come into my inbox.




That got my attention. A "login to my account" from an iPhone in Greece was
certainly not me.

I should have looked more closely at the sender email address. That would have
told me this was a scam. But I was on a call on my phone, in a taxi, so I
clicked on the "Secure your X account now here" link and logged in to change my
password. In doing so, I provided my password and two factor code to the hacker.

There are a host of mistakes in that last paragraph. All of them are things I
know better than to do. But I did all of them.

First, I should have inspected the sender email address more closely. I did not.

Second, I should have inspected the URL of the webpage that the "secure your
account now here" link took me to. I did not.

Third, I should have just ignored the email because I have a strong 2 factor
system using Yubikeys on that account. I also have a very strong password on it.
A login from an iPhone in Greece would be almost impossible.

But I did none of those things. I was multi-tasking, in transit, and jet lagged.
And I screwed up.

I knew it almost instantly. And then, for three hours I tried escalating the
situation to Twitter/X support to get them to shut the account down. I knew what
was coming. Anyone who has access to that account can run a scam at almost 700k
followers.

I was unable to get to anyone who could escalate to Twitter. I filed several
account takeover support requests and texted a bunch of people I thought could
get to someone at Twitter. But none of that worked.

It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I knew what was coming and
could not stop it.

Around 6:15pm eastern, this scam was posted to my account.




Almost immediately my phone filled up with messages from all sorts of people
letting me know my account had been hacked. A few of them offered to escalate to
Twitter/X. I encouraged all of them to do that.

In particular, Sriram Krishnan came to the rescue. Not only did he escalate to
the right people at Twitter/X, but he also helped me in the following days to
get control of my account back. I am extremely grateful for all that he did for
me this week.

I am not clear what kind of scam was run on claim-fred dot com. It could have
simply been a way to get minting fees. But I fear it was a more sophisticated
attack aimed at sweeping wallets of funds and NFTs. I feel terrible about that.
It would not have happened but for my mistakes.

I'd also love any suggestions for getting claim-fred dot com taken down.
Coinbase Wallet has a warning on it already which is great.




But I'd like to see it come down entirely if there is a way to make that happen.

I am frequently targeted with hacks. There have been three now that I have
written about on AVC. Two of them have come in the last few months. I understand
I am a target. I also understand that I have a responsibility to exercise great
caution because of that.

I failed to do that this week and I am very sorry about that.

February 6, 2024


FROM KIK TO KIN TO CODE



Thirteen years ago, USV invested in the Kik, the company behind the popular
messaging app of the same name, and I joined the Board. That set me off on a
journey that went from mobile messaging (Kik), to crypto (Kin), to payments
(Code).

One of the things about me, and my partners at USV, is we tend to stick with
companies and their founders for the long haul. One can argue the merits of that
approach, but it is what we do, and this particular journey is an excellent
example.

When the Kik messenger app lost out in the race to become the dominant mobile
messenger, the team, led by Kik's founder Ted Livingston, pivoted to building a
native cryptocurrency, Kin, that would work inside the Kin messenger. That was a
novel idea at the time and we are only now starting to see how powerful
messaging and money are together in a single app.

That led to the idea of building a developer ecosystem around Kin, which led to
the Kin Rewards Engine, another novel idea of giving developers an economic
incentive to build on a crypto asset. That idea has very much come of age now.

After giving Kin to the ecosystem, and selling the Kik messenger, Ted and the
team behind Kik and Kin, started a non-profit to build the killer app for Kin,
called Code.

After two and half years of iterating and building, they have formed a new
for-profit company called Code to bring to market a global payments app, also
called Code. And they have raised a round of financing to support the
go-to-market effort.

You can see Code in action by scrolling down here and you can download it here.

We are very bullish on payment applications being built on web3 rails. The Code
team has a novel and different approach to the market that we are excited about.

And, of course, we are always eager to support a team that we have worked with
over a long period of time and built strong and deep relationships with.

January 24, 2024


INVESTING AT THE EDGE



About a year ago, the USV partnership kicked off a process to articulate an
overarching thesis for how we invest across all of the sectors we are active in.
Over the years, we have broadened the aperture of where we invest but have
approached each sector with a similar angle. We wanted to find the words to
articulate that angle and put them on the home page of our website and front and
center in our minds.

That process culminated in a blog post that Nick wrote and posted yesterday. You
should go read that entire post. It is excellent. But to summarize, we chose
these words to describe what we invest in at USV:

> USV invests at the edge of large markets being transformed by technological
> and societal pressures

Each word in that sentence was chosen for a reason but two of them are worth
calling out:

Edge - we want to be investing at the edge of markets. We have found that
attacking the status quo with a full frontal assault is difficult. Making an end
run around it is a lot easier.

Societal - most people think VCs invest in technological changes. We have found
that our greatest returns come from societal changes.

A single sentence can say a lot and we think this one does. If you want the
detail and context behind it, go read Nick's post.




January 23, 2024


MINTING IS THE NATIVE BUSINESS MODEL FOR WEB3 (AND MAYBE AI TOO)



We have all been targeted by ads that you look at and wonder “how do they know I
am in the market for that product?” The answer is that the AI/ML models that big
tech companies have trained on our personal data are incredibly accurate and
powerful. 

There are two problems with this:

The first is that “our data” which they use to train their models actually
belongs to us but for two decades now, we have been giving it to big tech
companies.

The second is the models that are trained on our data belong to big tech even
though they are trained on our data.

It doesn’t have to be this way and I don’t believe it will be this way for much
longer.

Web3 will help.

Let me explain.

If you go to zora.co, you will find a social feed that feels like Tumblr,
Instagram, Facebook, etc that you can scroll through and like the things you
see. But there is one difference, liking is called minting on Zora. You don’t
just tell the creator you like their work, you send them a tiny bit of money and
you get to own a copy of the work.

It may not seem like much, but the difference here is that you own one of the
things you liked and you paid a tiny bit for it. If the creator gets a thousand
people to do what you did, which is not that uncommon at places like Zora, they
make a nice bit of money on their work.

And the collector is building their own data set that they own. It is on the
blockchain and it belongs to them.

The next obvious step is for companies like Zora to offer collectors the ability
to train models on their collections. This turns their collections into training
data sets. But these are training data sets the collectors own. Not training
data sets that Zora owns.

It won’t be long until we have open-source AI/ML models that we can run on our
phones. These will be our models and we can train them on our data sets.

Consider this blog post. You can collect it too. There is a green button on the
upper right of this post that says Collect. When you click that the same thing
happens here as what happens on Zora. I get a tiny bit of money and you get your
own copy of this post. 

Below is a screenshot of an Ethereum wallet I have connected to this blog. You
can see some of the collecting transactions from this blog over the last week or
two.







So what is going on here?

1/ Writers are getting paid for their work

2/ Readers are building a data set that they own, On Chain. Not on Facebook.

The next obvious step is for us to have our own open-source models that we train
on these collections we are building.

These open-source models will help us write, find new things to read, and more.
It can inspire us to start a new company, invest in a new company, listen to a
new song, find artwork to hang over our fireplace and many other things we want
to do.

Going back to Chris Dixon’s words in yesterday’s post:

> in the long run, we are still going to need an economic covenant between AI
> systems and content providers. Al will always need new data to stay up to
> date. The world evolves: tastes change, new genres emerge, things get
> invented. There will be new subjects to describe and represent. The people who
> create content that feeds AI systems will need to be compensated. 

There is a way forward that works for writers, readers, collectors, creators,
and everyone.

It starts with us owning our work and allowing others to pay us to collect our
work.

The thing that makes me so optimistic about this is that it is not some dream.
It is happening right here on this blog. The tools we need to change the way the
world works are already here. We just need to start using them.

My next post will be about how we get more people using these tools.

January 22, 2024


THE NATIVE BUSINESS MODEL FOR CONTENT



If I asked you what the native business model for content is, you'd probably say
either advertising or subscriptions. But I am starting to think that AI is to
content what search engines are to browsers. Money machines.

I was emailing with my friend Lock a few weeks ago and we were talking a bit
about my 2024 predictions post. I made reference to the section in that post
about AI and litigation and said:

> maybe we will get a settlement that makes all the big AIs pay 2/3 of their
> revenue to content companies and writers and we will have the native revenue
> model for media!

I was only half joking. 

When the Hollywood writers went on strike, I suggested to all of my writer
friends that they should be happy to let AIs write films and TV shows as long as
they get paid to sit home and do nothing under the premise that the AIs were
trained on their work and so they are due royalties.

I was only half joking about that too.

In Chris Dixon’s book, Read Write Own, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, he
said this:

> Most current AI systems have no economic model for creators... in the long
> run, we are still going to need an economic covenant between AI systems and
> content providers. Al will always need new data to stay up to date. The world
> evolves: tastes change, new genres emerge, things get invented. There will be
> new subjects to describe and represent. The people who create content that
> feeds AI systems will need to be compensated. 

I could not agree more.

The only question is how this will come to be.

I think web3 is sitting on the answer.

Tune in tomorrow for more on this.

January 10, 2024


TRANSIT TECH LAB



The Partnership for NYC, alongside its partners at the MTA, the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey, NJ TRANSIT, and NYC Department of Transportation,
launched a call for applications for the 6th annual Transit Tech Lab this week.

To kick off this year’s program, the Transit Tech Lab is seeking early and
growth-stage tech companies with compelling solutions to one of three local
transit system challenges:

 * Customer Experience Challenge: How can we improve customer experience by
   better communicating service changes, reducing delays, and augment safety and
   cleanliness initiatives?

 * Resilience Challenge: How can we build a more resilient and adaptive transit
   system? 

 * NYCDOT’s Curb Activity Challenge: How can we maximize the city’s curb space
   to serve the multiple and varied needs of New Yorkers? 

 Representatives from each participating agency will evaluate applications based
on the technology’s impact and the applicant’s product, team, and overall value
proposition. Finalists will advance to conduct a proof-of-concept over an
eight-week period; the companies demonstrating the most compelling technologies
that align with the agencies' objectives have the opportunity to secure a
yearlong pilot.

Applications are due Wednesday, February 28.  Interested applicants are invited
to attend an information session on February 1 at 1pm ET.

If you know of a company or emerging innovator that would be a good fit for this
year’s Transit Tech Lab, please let us know about them via email or encourage
them to apply here: https://transitinnovation.org. 

January 9, 2024


EMPIRE AI



Last summer I sat down with Tom Secunda, who co-founded Bloomberg LP with Mike
Bloomberg, to talk about areas of shared philanthropic interest. Tom told me
that academic institutions do not have access to the kind of AI/ML
infrastructure that the top tech companies have and he wanted to fix that. His
idea was a consortium of Universities in New York State, the New York State
Government, and philanthropic donors. His vision was a large shared facility in
upstate NY with state-of-the-art AI/ML infrastructure that participating
academic institutions could make available to their faculty for cutting-edge
AI/ML research.

Tom is a convincing person. He convinced me that this was a good idea last
summer and he went on to convince Governor Hochul and the top Universities in
New York State and his fellow philanthropist Jim Simons.

I am glad Governor Hochul and her team were quick to recognize the promise of
this idea. Today, Governor Hochul will announce Empire AI in her State of the
State Address.

Empire AI will be a "state-of-the-art artificial intelligence computing center
in Upstate New York to be used by New York's leading institutions to promote
responsible research and development, create jobs, and unlock AI opportunities
focused on public good."

Over $400mm of public and private funding has been committed over ten years to
build and operate the Empire AI facility. New York State is contributing $275mm
and over $125mm is coming from participating Universities and philanthropy.

I am excited to see New York State step up like this. Other states, like
Massachusetts, have done something similar but this NYS effort is significantly
larger. I expect more states will follow now. Cutting-edge AI/ML research should
not be limited to large tech companies. We need our academic institutions to be
on equal footing. This model, particularly if more states adopt it, can help
make that possible.

New York is one of the leading AI centers in the US, along with California and
Massachusetts. We see this every day as entrepreneurs building AI companies come
knocking on our door. It is very encouraging to see our local government
supporting and investing in this new area of economic development.

I want to congratulate Governor Hochul, the leaders of our academic
institutions, and Tom Secunda, for their vision and initiative here. This is
important.

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