Musings of a VC in NYC

Feature Friday: Hack Your Home Screen

I was hanging with Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of our portfolio company DuckDuckGo yesterday. I was lamenting that I could not replace the Google search widget at the top of my android home screen with the DuckDuckGo search widget. Gabe said "you can use Nova Launcher to do that."

I had not heard of Nova Launcher but immediately downloaded it (and the premium upgrade too). Gabe showed me how to replace the standard google launcher with Nova Launcher. He started to show me all kinds of cool things you can do with Nova (like create new gestures) but I waved him off because my head was already spinning with all the cool stuff that Nova lets you do.

For now, I have just used it to hack my home screen. I have changed the grid so I get one more column and one more row. And I have replaced Google at the top with DuckDuckGo:

If you want to customize your android experience a bit more than Google allows, get Nova Launcher. I am going to learn to do all the stuff Gabe does with it and may report back again. I might even turn my phone into a drone :)

Good Things Come to Those Who Code Campaign Wrapup

The widget came down on Tuesday night at midnight. The DonorsChoose campaign I called Good Things Come To Those Who Code is over.  Here are some stats:

Total Raised: $25,172

Donors: 162

Students Helped: 8,551

I really appreciate the generosity of everyone who participated. The number to focus on is 8,551 students who will have their classroom experience improved in some way because of you.

Here's a list of all the DonorsChoose campaigns I have done on this blog over the years. There have been seven in total since 2007. In total we have raised almost $190,000 in this community for teachers and their classrooms via DonorsChoose. That is fantastic.

Mentoring At AFSE

When I've written posts about the stuff I and others are working on to bring more computer science into the K-12 school system, I often hear "let me know how I can help." This post is about how you can help.

The Academy Of Software Engineering (AFSE), located in the Washington Irving Campus near Union Square in Manhattan, has a great program called iMentor. Every AFSE student is paired with a mentor who attends a monthly mentoring session at AFSE. These sessions are highly structured events where the student and mentor get to work together on things and get to know each other. The students and mentors are encouraged to email each other in the off weeks.

Most of the mentors at AFSE come from the tech sector but they do not have to be software engineers and most are not. The main thing is the students get to have a relationship with someone who cares about them and their education. It sounds like so little, but in reality, it is very powerful.

If you want to mentor a student at AFSE, you can apply to do that here. Just make sure to mention AFSE somewhere in the application and you'll be earmarked to mentor at AFSE.

We Didn't Know What We Had

I sat next to Jim Cramer last night at a dinner put on by some mutual friends. I hadn't seen Jim in a while so it was a great opportunity to take a trip down memory lane. In 1996 or early 1997, my prior firm Flatiron Partners led the first round of outside financing for TheStreet.com. I joined the board and eventually became Chairman before stepping down a decade ago.

When I first met Jim, he was running a hedge fund and blasting posts from his trading desk. This was 1996 and what he was doing was unprecedented. He was publishing in real time his thoughts on what was going on in the markets. On some days, Jim would post three or four dozen times.

As Jim and I reminisced about those days last night, I said to him "you were tweeting and blogging a decade before anyone else was doing that." He nodded, "yeah, that is what I was doing".

But we didn't know that. The money our firm invested went to hiring a team of journalists and we saw ourselves as the Wall Street Journal of the web. That was a mistake. The Wall Street Journal is the Wall Street Journal of the web. What Jim was doing was something way more native, way more powerful, and way more important. But we missed it.

TheStreet.com has gone on to build a niche financial publishing business that is a solid and profitable company. But it could have been the Twitter and Blogger of Wall Street. That's what it was at the start. But we didn't know what we had.

Because It's Standard

Case studies are true stories that teach lessons. And one of the great lessons I got in my career was care of a lawyer named Morty. This is a reblog of a post I wrote in Feb 2007. I thought about it last week in an email discussion with a friend. And so I decided to share it with all of you as part of the MBA Mondays series.

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I woke up thinking about Morty this morning. I haven't seen or heard from him in over ten years. But Morty taught me one of the most important lessons about negotiating that I've ever learned.

Morty was Isaak's partner in Multex early on. They put up the initial money to get it started. Morty wasn't a venture guy. He was a real estate lawyer and sometime real estate investor. He was as conservative as you can get and never liked the startup/venture business. But he was Isaak's partner. And Isaak asked Morty to negotiate the term sheet for the seed round with me.

This was late 1992 and I'd been in the venture business for five years and was on my second or third deal on my own. I'd negotiated a bunch of term sheets by that point, but I'd never had a negotiation like the one I was in for with Morty. Actually I don't think I've ever had one as rough as that since.

Morty wasn't familiar with venture terms. They didn't make sense to him. So standing in an airport pay phone (before cell phones) I went line by line, term by term with Morty.

We got to redemption and he started in. "Why do you need this provision Fred?". I was getting tired of his non stop push back and blurted out "Because it's standard. We always get this provision. Always have, and always will".

That got Morty pissed. He shouted over the phone:

I don't give a f>>>k that you always get this provision. Doesn't mean shit to me. This deal will be the first time you don't get it if you don't explain why you need it.

That set me back on my heels and I weakly explained that if the deal goes sideways for years, we need some way to get out of the deal and redemption provides that path. I don't even remember if he bought that argument. But I do know that we had redemption in the Series A at Multex and pretty much every deal I had done at that time.

But the point Morty made rang true to me and I've lived by his rule ever since. I never ever say that a specific provision is "standard". Nothing is standard. You either need it or you don't. Explain why you need it and most of the time you'll get it or something like it as long as both sides really want to make a deal.

From DonorsChoose To Kickstarter

In the wake of my Return and Ridicule post, I was asked how one goes about finding these services that are ignored and/or ridiculed. And the answer I gave was "if you use them you might realize how powerful they are."

I woke up thinking about that in the context of Kickstarter today. It must be related to the fact that today is the fourth anniversary of Kickstarter's launch. How was it that I was so sure the Kickstarter project would work when it launched back in 2009? Well it was because of what happened on this blog a couple years before that.

The story starts in the fall of 2007. Charles Best, the founder of DonorsChoose emailed me and asked if I would enter AVC into the DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge. He wanted this community to compete with other tech blogs to see who could raise the most money for teachers and their classrooms. I said yes and we entered, and won, the tech category in 2007. We entered again in 2008 and won again. In the final year of the social media challenge (renamed to encompass more than bloggers) we won the tech category again. This post, which I wrote in November 2009, after our threepeat, shows that the AVC community raised almost $60,000 for teachers and their classrooms in those three October showdowns.

So when Perry Chen came by to talk about Kickstarter in the summer of 2009, my mind was prepared to understand what he and his co-founders were up to. When he explained that artists and other project creators were going to post their projects and get them funded on the Internet, I thought "of course" instead of "that will never work."

And I have Charles and the DonorsChoose team and the AVC community to thank for that. Which I book in the category of "what goes around, comes around".

And I cannot resist reminding everyone that we have a DonorsChoose campaign running on AVC right now, called Good Things Come To Those Who Code. If you have not made a contribution and want to, now is the time. The campaign ends at midnight on Tuesday. Go here if you want to participate.

Video Of The Week: Parrot AR Drone

I bought one of these on amazon at the suggestion of Laurent Eschenauer in yesterday's comment thread. I can feel my 14 year old self re-emerging. I can't wait to play with it. It's also a good excuse to learn a bit of node.js so I can program the thing.

If you want to skip the unboxing and information and go right to the flying part, that starts about 5:40 in.

If you have three minutes more for additional drone entertainment, click here.

Fun Friday: What Would You Use A Drone For?

In my talk yesterday at Princeton, we got to discussing drones. A young woman asked me what I would use a drone for.

My answer was dry cleaning runs. I want to hand my drone the week's dry cleaning, have the drone fly over to sixth ave and 10th street where our dry cleaner is, drop off the clothes and then return home. When the dry cleaning is ready to pick up, the drone would fly back, get it, and bring it back home.

Of course, if everyone did this, the skies in NYC would be so filled with drones that we wouldn't be able to see the sun. That doesn't feel so great to be honest.

What would you use a drone for?

Return and Ridicule

I am going down to Princeton today to talk to Ed Zschau's class on entrepreneurship today. Ed asked me what I wanted to talk about. I told him "return and ridicule".

I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years. We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can't make money by being wrong. And you can't make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. I really like that framework.

The same logic applies to starting companies. If you start a company in a market everyone knows is going to be big, then you will have a ton of competition. If, however, you start a company in a market everyone is laughing at, you won't have too many competitors.

This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers.

Chris Dixon has a great post about hobbyists. He likes to look at what the next homebrew computer club type activities are these days. When I saw Chris yesterday he was talking about drones and asteroids. I laughed. He grinned ear to ear. Chris knows that it's good to be ridiculed.

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster. Momentum investing works in highly liquid markets (sometimes). From what I can tell, it almost never works in private markets.

Better to invest in laughing stocks. Becuase she who laugh lasts, laughs best.

TEALS Update

Regular readers will recall this great program called TEALS that I've blogged about a few times that brings software engineers into schools to teach CS classes before they go to work. We have hosted two information sessions that have attracted almost 200 software engineers interested in teaching next school year.

We now have ten schools in NYC that have signed on to have a TEALS program in their school. We need 40 software engineers to do the programs in all 10 schools. The last time I checked, there were 24 who had applied. So we need some more applications. The deadline to apply is May 1st. You can apply online here.

Here's a map of the 65 schools around the country that have TEALS programs in their schools. The NYC closeup looks like this:

I realize this is just a drop in the bucket as we have thousands of schools in NYC. But seeing this map makes me very happy because we don't have a single TEALS school in NYC in the current school year.

If you are a software engineer working in NYC and want to teach computer science at one of these ten schools next year, please apply online. You can make a real difference and help bring opportunities to kids who want them badly.