Musings of a VC in NYC

My New Year's Resolution: Start Coding Again

It's that time of year for a new year's resolution. I've been thinking about mine all day. And then I learned about Code Year, a service built by our portfolio company Codecademy that helps you learn to code in 2012.

Here's how it works. You give Code Year your email address and they send you a new interactive coding lesson every week.

So my new year's resolution is to get back my long lost coding skills. I've signed up for the weekly email and plan to do them every week. You might want to join me. If so, go here and get started.

Raise Cache

On the evening of November 17th, the NY tech community is going to throw a party to raise $100k for HackNY. It is called Raise Cache and it should be a lot of fun.

At 8:30pm there is going to be a fashion show featuring members of the tech industry on the runway. I have a terrible feeling that I may be one of them. If so, I apologize in advance for embarassing myself, particularly to my wife and children.

At 9:30pm there is a party with open bar and a "in real life" turntable.fm DJ set. There has already been trash talking between the DJs who are listed here.

There is also a pre-show mixer if you can't wait to start partying.

All of this action goes down at the Armory on Lex and 25th in NYC. There are all sorts of ticket combinations and student discounts. You can see all of them here. The early bird sales close sometime on thursday so if you want to get a discount (other than student discount), get your tickets now.

HackNY is an amazing program and it deserves all of our support. This is a great way to show that support and also have some fun.

If you don't know what HackNY is, it's a summer program to bring top CS students from schools all around the country to NYC to work in our top tech startups. Here's a video that explains it well.

Program Or Be Programmed

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for "those who aren't technical". I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.

I don't mean that everyone should become a software engineer. I do mean that everyone should understand software engineering (or whatever technical subject/industry you want to work in). I don't speak French fluently. But when I go to France, I know enough French to speak it badly until the person on the receiving end changes the language to English.

Dennis Crowley claims to be a terrible programmer. And yet he and Naveen built the first version of Foursquare together. Their third team member was Harry and Harry's first job was to rewrite all of Dennis' code. Dennis is the kind of technical I'm talking about. Learn how to hack something together so that you can get people interested in your idea, your project, your startup. If you can do that, then you have a better chance of success.

Another great reason to "get technical" is so that you can work better with technical people. If you understand at least some of what they are doing, if you can look at their work product (the code) and understand what it is doing, if you can pick up a ticket and contribute when time is tight, then you will be seen as part of the team. And that is critical.

All of this is a big reason for our most recent investment, in Codecademy. Codecademy wants to be the online resource for people who want to learn to code. What you see there now is basically a prototype. And yet somewhere between 500,000 and 1mm people have started learning javascript using the prototype. They are clearly on to something.

I haven't written code professionally in twenty-five years. The last application I built was a custom app for my mother in law's company. She ran her business on it for twenty years. I wrote simulation software for a company building ships for the US Navy. And I wrote software that ran data acquisition for a lab at MIT. I was never a great programmer. I was a hacker. But I do understand the basic concepts, I can build something. I think most everyone can get to the place I got to and I'd encourage everyone to try.

Our partner Andy wrote a great post on the USV blog announcing our investment in Codecademy. He wrapped up his post with a quote from Douglas Rushkoff. It's where I got the title of this post from and it says it well.

When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them. In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed.

Fifty For Fifty Recap

AVC regulars have probably noticed that the Donors Choose widget is gone from the right sidebar. That's because the month of August 2011 has come and gone and the Fifty For Fifty campaign is over.

It was a smashing success.

365 people donated a total of $54,028 (as of right now) and helped over 10,000 students by funding programs that connect these students' families to their classrooms.

10,000 students is a lot of kids. And these are mostly kids who need some help. Their teachers thank you, I thank you, the Gotham Gal thanks you, and I sure hope their families thank you.

There's a meetup for everyone (all 365 people) who gave to this campaign as well as me and The Gotham Gal and some folks from Donors Choose on November 9th, from 6pm to 8pm, at the USV Event Space. The Meetup page is here if you'd like to attend.

Finally, I promised to post a list of all donors along with their Twitter handles. I will do that once I get the list from the Donors Choose team.

In closing, I just want to say that the outpouring of support on this campaign is deeply appreciated by The Gotham Gal and me. We could not have asked for a better 50th birthday present. Thank you.

Fifty For Fifty!

Last night we passed our goal of raising $50,000 for teacher's projects that bring families closer to the classroom. The Gotham Gal and I are delighted. This has been an amazing gift that all of you have given us. Almost 10,000 students and their families will benefit from your generosity.

This is the fifth monthly campaign that this blog community has done via Donors Choose. In past years, we've raised about $20,000 each year from about 200 donors. This year, we raised more than $50,000 from 314 donors (and counting). That's a big step up!

We will leave the Giving Page and blog widget up for the remainder of the month. Hopefully we can raise a bit more for classrooms. At the end of the month, we will wrap this up, I will write a final blog post with the stats on the campaign, and I will list all the donors and link to their twitter handles if we have them.

On November 9th, from 6-8pm in the USV Event Space, the Gotham Gal and I will host a meetup for all the people who donated in this campaign plus some of the wonderful people from Donors Choose who make it possible to do this. We will get a Meetup page up shortly so people can RSVP for that event. It will be limited to those who gave in this campaign.

I talked to Charles Best, the founder and CEO of Donors Choose, about this campaign last week. He said that there are only a few other communities in the world that can rally around a Donors Choose campaign like this. This is a special place and you are special people. I am so gratified to be the "bartender" of this joint.

Fifty

The Gotham Gal asked me this morning "how does it feel to be 50?" I said "it feels good. another accomplishment."

It's only a few waking hours into my 50s but so far it feels great. I've never been more content with my place in the world, never felt better, and never had so much I want to do.

A friend gave me a book about turning 50, I've been trying to read it, but it's filled with all these "getting old" jokes and they aren't making me laugh. They don't resonate with me.

What does resonate with me is friends and family. The past week has been fantastic in that regard. This weekend my mom, dad, and brothers and their families are spending the weekend with us. Good times with friends and family at the end of the summer has always marked my birthday and this year has been particularly great in that way.

I'm going to start celebrating turning 50 by going out and getting the makings of breakfast with my brother. But before I do that, let me take one more moment to encourage everyone out there to consider a contribution to the Fifty For Fifty campaign we are doing via Donors Choose. We are getting really close, we passed $43,000 yesterday. Please consider contributing if you haven't done so yet.

MBA Mondays Live and Skillshare

If there was ever any confusion about why I blog, maybe this story will be illuminating.

Six weeks ago, I wrote a blog post called Teaching. It was about a dream I had about teaching in front of a live classroom and it went on to talk about the value of in person teaching and learning.

Later that day an entrepreneur in NYC we know pretty well forwarded that post to my partner Albert with the news that he was about to sign a term sheet with another VC firm and that he was drawn to our firm's vision of teaching as outlined in the blog post.

That led to a frantic weekend of phone calls, a monday meeting, and a decision to invest alongside the other VC firm.

That entrepreneur is Michael Karnjanaprakorn, the company is Skillshare, the other VC firm is our good friends at Spark Capital, and today Skillshare is announcing that our two firms have teamed up to finance this vision:

transform every community into a campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student

That's a compelling vision and Michael and his partner Malcolm have built an equally compelling product through which anyone with a class to teach can offer it to willing students. 

If you go back to my Teaching post, you'll recall that I ended it musing about where to take MBA Mondays next:

I've been thinking about the ideal model that combines all of the above. A freely available curriculum on the web that grows and evolves over time. A physical space where people can come and take classes that are recorded and broadcast live and also available for viewing after the fact. Some version of that seems ideal. Should it happen in connection with an existing education institution (an engineering school or a business school), or should it be its own educational institution? Not sure.

I've answered my own question. Sometime this fall, MBA Mondays classes will be offered via Skillshare. I will teach them in the USV event space on Monday evenings at 6pm. Classes will be one hour. They will be streamed live and recorded for posterity. The live stream and the video will be free. The classes will have an attendance fee which will be given to charity, most likely Donors Choose.

I'm still working out the schedule, how many classes a year, whether I go back and start teaching from the first post, or whether I teach the post of the day. I'm working out how to select the students for each class (first come, first serve?, something else?). I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and also on Skillshare. Here's my partner Albert's post on the USV blog about our investment in Skillshare.

Fifty For Fifty Update

On August 1st, we launched the "Fifty For Fifty" campaign to raise $50k for classroom projects that bring families closer to the classroom.

Twelve days in, we've raised just over $27,000 from 137 donors.

That's better than half way to our goal which is fantastic.

I'd like to thank all of those 137 people for their generosity.

And in an effort to encourage more of you to participate, a few updates are in order.

First, The Gotham Gal and I will be doing a meetup in November in NYC. Anyone who gives to the campaign will be invited to attend. This will be like the meetups we've done for past Donors Choose campaigns but we'll host it in the USV event space instead of the public school cafeteria where we've done the prior ones. I will be back with a specific date for the meetup in a few days.

Second, I am going to blog the names and possibly twitter handles of everyone who gave to this campaign. I will wait until the end of the campaign to do this. If for some reason you don't want to be listed, let me know.

Bringing families closer to the classroom is such an important part of education and I'm super pleased that we've already raised $27,000 to fund those efforts. Please consider joining the campaign and getting us to our goal of $50,000.

Fifty For Fifty

It's August, the month I was born, fifty years ago.

To celebrate this milestone, The Gotham Gal (who turns fifty six weeks after I do) and I are going to raise $50,000 for classroom projects focused on family via Donors Choose.

I've just kicked off this campaign by closing out a project by an LA teacher called The Family That Reads Together Stays Together. That's exactly the mindset we want to encourage with this campaign. Schools can only do so much, we need families engaged and involved, and we need to help teachers get them involved.

So we've curated a giving page full of projects that bring families and classrooms closer together. We are going to keep that page full of projects for the next month and our goal is to raise $50,000 for these projects this month. Sometime today, I will start running a widget on the right rail of this blog that looks sort of like this one below. It will stay there all month reminding everyone to consider contributing to this campaign.

The Gotham Gal is in on this campaign. Longtime readers know that I do this sort of thing at least once a year at AVC, but this is the first time The Gotham Gal and I will do a cross blog Donors Choose campaign. I'm excited about the opportunity to collaborate on something like this with her and the community at Gotham Gal.

So help us both celebrate turning fifty by joining this campaign to help teachers connect families and classrooms. It's a great cause.

Note: If you came here looking for a new MBA Mondays post, I took a week off to kick off this campaign. MBA Mondays will be back next week. You might enjoy perusing this list of all the 81 MBA Mondays posts to date.

Teaching

I woke up this morning in the middle of a vivid dream. I was standing in front of a large auditorium style classroom and teaching a bunch of college students. I was calling on people. Asking questions. Making jokes. Having fun. Teaching.

I've done that before. I taught classes at Penn to help put myself through grad school. And I've done guest lecturing so many times it is like second nature. But this dream was a bit different from what I've done in the past. It felt like it was my class and I was a faculty member.

My dad was a college professor (at West Point) in addition to a long military career. I've always thought that, like him, I would teach as a profession one day. It's the only thing that really interests me other than venture capital.

But I wonder if the classroom is the best place for me to do that. At some level this blog is my classroom. I look at what Sal Khan has done with his Khan Academy and I am inspired to think of new ways to teach.

MBA Mondays is an effort to understand what is possible in a blog format and what is not. Putting concepts down in a text format that anyone can read if they can get on the web is powerful. And the comments section allows for further discussion. The comments on the MBA Mondays post are often way better than the posts.

But every time I sit down in front of group of assembled entrepreneurs, I realize that the "in person thing" is different and better in some ways. I feed off the energy of real people sitting in the same room as me. I like the back and forth. Asking questions. Making jokes. Having fun. Teaching. Just like my dream this morning.

MBA Mondays can be a burden at times. I sit down in front of the computer each monday morning at 5am and churn out another post. It is work and it is not that much fun for me. Contrast that with stepping into a classroom of a hundred or so students armed with a topic for the day. That is a blast for me.

I've been thinking about the ideal model that combines all of the above. A freely available curriculum on the web that grows and evolves over time. A physical space where people can come and take classes that are recorded and broadcast live and also available for viewing after the fact. Some version of that seems ideal. Should it happen in connection with an existing education institution (an engineering school or a business school), or should it be its own educational institution? Not sure.

But the one thing I am sure of is that teaching is god's work and I love it and I'd like to do more of it.