Musings of a VC in NYC

Tech And The City

My longtime friend Alesandro Piol and his colleague Maria Teresa Cometto have been working on a book project to document the rise of New York City as a tech hub. They researched the book together and Maria wrote it over the past year. The book is called Tech And The City and is now available on Amazon (free for Amazon Prime members on your kindle).

I read a mostly final version of the book a month or two ago and then wrote the foreward.

The book does a very good job of explaining why New York City was not a participant in the early phases of the technology revolution and why it has come on strong in recent years. It also documents the leaders of the technology community in New York City and how they got things moving back in the early and mid 90s.

If you are a member of the NYC tech community or a student of tech hubs around the world, you will want to read this book. If you like technology, startups, and history, I am sure you will enjoy it as well.

The Book Of Awesome

If this book is as short and as good as this video, I am going to love it.

You can back the project on Kickstarter and get the book and other rewards. I just did.

Book Recommendation: Internet Architecture and Innovation

On the heels of its paperback release, I would like to recommend a book that is required reading in our shop, Internet Architecture and Innovation by Barbara van Schewick. I've mentioned Barbara before on this blog. She is a Law School Professor at Stanford and has written extensively on this important topic.

I am a fervent believer that everything that is great about the Internet emanates from its underlying architecture. That's where Barbara is coming from too, which is probably why we like her and her work so much at USV.

In this book, Barbara argues that the massive amount of innovation that has been made on top of the Internet is directly attributable to its architecture and that there are some parts of the architecture, most notably the last mile in wired and mobile, that are problematic and that do not benefit from the hypercompetitive nature of the open Internet.

This is an important piece of policy work and anyone who cares about the Internet ought to give it a read.

Related articles

Net Neutrality Issues and Barbara van Schewick's "Internet Architecture and Innovation" Book

Van Schewick's "Internet Architecture and Innovation" Out in Paperback

Internet Architecture and Innovation

Book Review: Makers By Chris Anderson

I took two flights across the country this week so in addition to a lot of catching up on email, I read a book. It is called Makers and it was written by Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson. This is the third book that I've read by Chris. The previous ones were The Long Tail and Free.

Chris writes books about the same things I blog about and USV invests in. We are certainly in sync in terms of the themes and memes that we are paying attention to.

Anyway, Makers is about "the new industrial revolution" that is brought about by personal manufacturing devices and web scale creation and innovation. It's about the intersection of companies like Etsy, Kickstarter, and Shapeways (all USV portfolio companies).

I suspect that there is nothing totally new to all of you in Chris' book. But he frames what is going on very well and I find these frameworks provided by folks like Chris and Steven Johnson and others to be incredibly helpful as we deal with a firehose of information and investments and try to find signal through the noise.

If you are interested in the revolution happening in personal manufacturing and are curious about what it means for innovation, startups, and even the economy and society, pick up a copy or put it on your Kindle. It's a quick read and a good read.

Related articles

Book Review: Chris Anderson's 'Makers: The New Industrial Revolution'

Wired's Chris Anderson: Today's 'Maker Movement' Is The New Industrial Revolution [TCTV]

New book on the maker revolution by Wired's Chris Anderson

Steve Rosenbaum: The World of 'Makers' Revealed by Wired's Chris Anderson

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson

Makers, book by Chris Anderson, and Manufacturing

Two Must Read Books For The AVC Community

There are many themes that grace this page from time to time. Two of the most common are the rise of startup communities and the role that the Internet can play in allowing society to governing itself. And there are two books out this week that are must reads on these two topics. Further and in full disclosure, they are written by two very good friends. No conflict no interest as it were.

Let's start with Startup Communities by Brad Feld. I met Brad in 1996. He had just moved to Boulder Colorado and was going to help build a startup community there by building a market leading VC firm in Boulder. Sounds audacious? Yes. But he did it. As I was working on the same idea for the past sixteen years in NYC, I was able to watch a parallel universe forming in Boulder with Brad at the center.  In Startup Communites, Brad tells us what he's learned from that experience and how the same thing can be done elswhere. If you want to create a Boulder or NYC tech scene in your community, this is your roadmap, bible, and textbook. You can get it on Kindle today and or pre-order the book for delivery next week.

On to Future Perfect by Steven Johnson. Back in the Spring, Steven emailed me a draft of this book. I put the PDF on my Kindle and started reading. I found myself yelling Yes, Yes, Yes as I was making my way through the chapters. I know most, if not all, of the stories in this book. I have been involved in some of them and have followed the others closely. Those stories tell me that there is a "case for progress in a networked age" and Steven makes that case as only he can, by telling the stories brilliantly and then wrapping the meaning of them together in a crisp, cohesive, and easy to understand narrative that leaves you with a framework to take out in the world. You can get Future Perfect on Kindle or in hardback right now as it was published earlier this week.

The comment thread on my Get Out The Vote post a couple days ago was downright depressing and full of anger and cynicism. So for all of you and everyone else, here is a short 3 min video from Steven talking about the ideas in his book and where they are going. If you need a shot of optimism this morning, watch it.

Cause & Effect

I've been reading sci-fi and thinking about sci-fi's relationship to technology innovation. I posted last week about Twitter and the Metaverse and noted that Neal Stephenson had imagined things in the early 90s that happened almost twenty years later.

But of course it is possible that many of the things that are built by technologists are reactions to reading sci-fi and wanting to realize the fertile imaginations of sci-fi authors.

So it's not entirely clear exactly who is inspiring who. Like most things, it is likely a bit of both. Technologists create new things. Writers are inspired and create stories that reflect these emerging new technologies. Technologists read those stories and are inspired by them.

It's a virtuous circle. Technology innovation doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in a dialog with society. And sci-fi writers are but one example of the way society impacts technology.

I think that's one of the reasons that many of the most interesting bay area startups are choosing to locate themselves in the city. And it is one of the reasons that NYC is developing a vibrant technology community. Society is at its most dense in rich urban environments where society and technology can inspire each other on a daily basis. Steven Johnson wrote about this phenomenon in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From.

So if you want to know what is going to happen next in the world of technology, you need to be thinking about society and where it is going, how it is interacting with technology, and how it is inspiring technologists. Which is why I am reading a lot of sci-fi this summer.

My New Nexus 7"

I still think of a 7" as a vinyl record for EPs and singles.

But 7" is going to start to mean someting else as I believe it is an ideal form factor for tablets.

I moved from a Kindle to an iPad for reading a couple years ago. I wrote about that at the time and explained that I preferred the backlighting and the ability to uses maps and wikipedia and such to jump out of the book and drill down on something in the book that sparks my curiosity.

Then the Kindle Fire came along and I immediately grabbed one of them. I've been reading on a Kindle Fire since it came out. I love it for reading books. But it is not a true Android tablet. It is really a Kindle with some extra stuff like a browser and some apps.

Some friends at Google sent me a Nexus 7" last week. I set it up yesterday and I've been using it for about 24 hours. So these are preliminary thoughts on it.

There is something very comforting about logging into a device with my Android/Google credentials and getting all my apps downloaded to it automatically. There is also something very comforting about getting a clean build of the most recent version of Android on a device. The Nexus 7" provides both of those comforts right out of the box.

I put a bunch of my favorite apps on the home screen:

If you look at the bottom of the home screen you'll see a yellow icon next to the Chrome browser. That is Bria, a SIP client that I have been using on my android phone. With Bria, the Nexus 7" can be a phone and I used it yesterday to make a few calls. It works great but if I really wanted to use this device as a phone, I'd want a bluetooth headphone because a 7" tablet is not ideal for talking into.

The three apps that I use a lot that aren't on my Nexus 7" home screen are Instagram, Tumblr and Kik. Instagram and Tumblr are not available on the Nexus 7". I hope these companies fix that because I would use these two apps a lot on this device to follow folks on Instagram and Tumblr. Kik only works on one device at a time so if I put it on the Nexus 7", it would stop working on my phone. So it's not on my tablet.

But the main thing I use the Nexus 7" for is reading, primarily on the Kindle app.

Reading on the Kindle App on the Nexus 7" is a lot like reading on the Kindle Fire. But the Kindle Android app is not quite as responsive as the Kindle Fire. I find that I have to be a bit more assertive with my swipes for the next page. That might be a transition thing or it could be annoying. I don't know yet. I think the features are slightly different too. But I haven't noticed anything super different between the two reading experiences.

The bottom line is that I think the 7" tablet is a great form factor and I prefer it to the iPad for a bunch of reasons. It is more mobile. It is lighter and more comfortable being held in one hand. And I like the amount of a page that is rendered on the 7" screen. It allows me to read more quickly.

The good news for iPad/iOS fans is that Apple is apparently going to come out with a 7" iPad soon. So you don't have to go Android to get the 7" experience. But if you want to try Android or you want to try a 7" experience right now, you might give the Nexus 7" a try. It's available for pre-order for $199. I don't know when it will broadly available but I suspect soon.

Fun Friday: The AVC Book Club

We talked about books last December on AVC. It was a good one.

RichardF suggested in wednesday's disqussion that we talk about books again. He's going on vacation and so am I and we both need some good books to read.

I will kick this off. I am finishing The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. This is a book about three young adults graduating from college in the early 80s. That was me and the Gotham Gal thirty years ago. It is also a love letter to Roland Barthes and his book, A Lover's Discourse. My daughters told me to read this and I am glad I did.

Next up is Reamde by Neal Stephenson. This was a gift by AVC community member Dave Pinsen. Dave knows that much of our investment strategy at USV comes from reading Neal's books and getting a glimpse into the future. He gave me Reamde in hardback. It's over 1000 pages. I will put it on my Kindle Fire for the vacation. And I will put the hardback in my office. I prefer sci-fi over business books every day of the week.

So that's what I am reading. How about all of you? What should Richard and bring on vacation?

The Engineer's Brain

I've been reading The Corrections this long weekend. This book came out over ten years ago, but I'd never read it so I pulled it out of our bookshelf and cracked it open after we got off the mountain on Saturday. I hope to finish it on the plane ride home today.

The father figure in the book is Alfred. He's a railroad engineer who also dabbles in metalurgy experiments in his basement. He's a familiar character to me. My dad is an engineer and I have an engineer's brain as well. Apparently so does my friend Brad Feld.

The Gotham Gal tires of this mindset at times. She will say in exasperation "you can't solve every problem Fred." But that's how my mind works. Find problem, solve it, move one to the next one.

My engineer tendencies are reinforced by the work I do. Most entrepreneurs we back are also engineers. They find a problem and they set out to solve it. That journey is often a startup and we are along for the ride. Solving problems creates value in our business. Value creation is success. So the feedback loop is reinforcing and problem solving is the name of my game.

But the Gotham Gal is right. I can't solve every problem as much as I want to. The person or organization that has the problem has to want to solve it too. And when the will is not there, as clear as the solution is, its best to leave it alone.

I've been trying to decide what to do on the subject of online piracy. I think there are good solutions to the problem that involve technical approaches that leverage the work the technology industry has done with domain name registration and spam/virus/malware filtering. I laid them out in a discussion I participated in last week at the Paley Center. But the entertainment industry must want to solve the core problems, not just the symptoms. And it is not clear to me that the entertainment industry wants to solve the problem. So maybe I should move on.

The same is true of the companies we work with. They often have problems that can be solved, and have been solved in many other companies. But if they do not have the will to solve them, then all of our effort to address the issue is wasted. Our desire to solve the problem will simply come across as interference, meddling, or worse.

So as I move from youthful enthusiasm to elderly wisdom, one of my development goals is to supress the desire to solve every problem and focus on the ones where I can make a difference. I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it and making progress.

Related articles

• How Politicians and Engineers are different (om.co)
• Compromise vs. Problem Solving (feld.com)
• You are What You Read (inkspeare.wordpress.com)

Fun Friday: What I'm Reading Now

Two weeks ago, we used Fun Friday to talk about movies to see. It was fun. And I got a list of movies to watch that will last me months and months.

In the same vein, we are going to talk about books today. Not the best books of all time (maybe we'll do that some friday), but what we are reading right now.

I'll start with my list:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami - This is the english translation of the Japanese original. It's a surreal story of a man's search for his cat and then his wife. I've been working on this book since the thanksgiving holiday. I hope to finish it soon. I've never read any Murakami and I've been told this is his best work. I'm enjoying it very much.

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart - My friend Nick Bilton told me to put this on my Kindle. It's up next after Wind-Up Bird. It's a "dystopian vision of the near future." I love reading about the future. This is going to be my kind of book.

Feeding Eden - Susan Weissman - My partner Andy's wife Susan has written a book that is available for pre-order and will come out in a couple months. The Gotham Gal has the gally. She read it over the last couple days and blogged about it yesterday. Now it's on my reading list.

Boomerang - Michael Lewis - My father in law and my brother in law both recommended this book to me recently. I like Michael's books and this is a topic - the failures of the weaker european economies - that I'm quite interested in.

I hope to get through all of these books over the next two weeks which I'll be spending on our family's annual year end vacation. If I get through all of them, I'll just reach into this comment thread for the next purchase on my Kindle.

OK, your turn now folks. Please drop links into your comments if you can find the time to do that.