Got a text last week from
@kvogt
asking if I would be the very first public rider in a Cruise car.
I mean, what do you say to that!
Thanks
@kvogt
,
@danielkan
& the team for partnering at the Series A seven years ago, and proceeding to make sci-fi a reality. In awe of you all.
Why isn’t there a startup that teaches programming to kids that approaches it more like liberal arts than math?
Nobody loves programming because they did a paint-by-numbers exercise correctly. I want programming for my kids that encourages the right brain as much as the left.
I decided after the .com bubble burst that being in San Francisco didn’t matter as much anymore. It was one of the worst mistakes of my professional life to not be in that city during the following five years of the tech world rebuilding.
1/ I was bearish on crypto + games for years. I was wrong, and have been chatting with my game dev friends about why for a few months. Welcome to the great upside down of game dev, it's fascinating. 👇
#thread
When a founder says “I’m building a metaverse” I literally don’t know what that means.
That’s from someone who’s spent his life in MMOs, Second Life, Discord, VRChat, Runescape, BBSes, Minecraft, and MUDs. It is not clarifying until you talk about what people are there to do.
Tried to capture today in the East Bay as accurately as possible. Not going to lie, the sci-fi obsessed teenager inside me was pretty excited. The adult is pretty alarmed.
Annual reminder. Holidays are often when your best team members are re-evaluating their lives, what they want to do, where the want to spend their time. Are you doing the same for them?
Doing a reference check on a VC, and chatting to a founder they worked with years ago. Reminded of that proverb…
“the tree remembers what the axe forgets”
To one person this is "overengineered" - but what does 100% knowing your bike is safe & will have storage do to your behavior?
There's a big difference between efficiency thinking and innovation thinking, and in startups we conflate the two a lot.
Why isn’t Silicon Valley more engaged civically? For those that have done well, you don’t see folks engaging in local non-profits (the arts, homelessness, etc) the way people do in NY or LA. And given that we are nothing if not systems designers, can we design a solution? ##
I worked with my kids for a couple days and built a card game using ChatGPT, Midjourney and some other AI tools. One of a couple AI side projects I did over the holiday break.
Here’s how:
@aginnt
@Medium
@brithume
@greggutfeld
@scrowder
I've never been prouder of Medium. I hope the other traditional media companies who have been harping on FB/Whatsapp and Twitter for allowing horrifically bad misinformation that endangers note that they are doing the right thing in a global pandemic.
Our cell-cultivated salmon nigiri. We grew this salmon ourselves, indoors, in the middle of the city; no fishing or fish farming required. The future of seafood tastes incredible.
Need an equivalent to Snapchat/Tiktok for writing. Medium feels like The Atlantic, newsletters feel like marketing, every platform trends to calcification. I want a tumblr.
Formed a two person sci-fi book club with my teenage son over this holiday. Discussions after each chapter. I will stress this is just, the, best, thing. First up, Diamond Age. What should we read next?
At Spark, we just raised a new set of funds, same size as previously. I also just passed a decade as a GP.
This last year has been the most excited I've been with work, including when I was a founder. A combo of the deep fulfillment of partnering with founders on their cause, a…
Virtually every emergent social behavior people are opining about in their Fornite think pieces have existed in Minecraft, at larger scale, for years. And at smaller scale in MMOs for decades before that. These are not new trends, just the latest iteration.
Product people. All you have is your customers faith in you. If you add a feature to move the numbers but lose their faith, you will lose them permanently instead of temporarily.
@nytimes
This week I’ve had at least half dozen conversations w/ startup founders excited to be back in the office.
Only, now they are basically alone in there, and it feels like a vacant shell of the energy it used to have. I expect huge employee churn is about to come.👇1/8
#blog
I've had a good lunch with friends, CEO calls all day, but frankly still ripped up about
@Bourdain
- can't shake it. His unrelenting message was not about food, it was about empathy, about humanity. And we need those heroes so badly right now.
Lost in all the IPO hype is that if we had a regularly functioning public market Airbnb, Stripe, DD, etc should have been public years ago. Now worried the pendulum will swing too far the other way.
This is not news. The "mainstream" of VC has never gotten consumer startups.
Seen this cycle 4 times in my career. Big consumer co exits, VCs pile in, but it's not in their bones so retrat until it repeats. Only a handful of VCs get consumer & actually are successful at it.
Venture capitalists have given up on the idea that they’ll make their career finding the next hit consumer marketplace, retail brand or media company.
Dealmaker by
@KateClarkTweets
We are delighted to announce Brian Watson (
@bwats
) is joining us at Spark.
Brian’s work leading products at Apple & VSCO will make him a great partner to founders, and we are excited he is joining our early-stage team. Welcome Brian!
It feels like 2020 has made everyone in America go through a mid-life crisis at exactly the same time, regardless of age.
So many new houses, new jobs, new cities, new marriages, new puppies, and even sometimes for the right reasons.
Skillshare, Masterclass, Teachable (Discover), Monthly. Explosions of ways to learn online. For a curious brain looking to explore it's overwhelming, has anyone built the Kayak of online courses?
These are my Palestinian grandparents in 1941, getting married in Nazareth. My Jido taught me backgammon, my love of arabic food came from my Teta. Sympathy is not enough, it requires empathy to find the collective will to end this. This is my family & it could have been yours.
What to expect from VC fundraising due to COVID19? What I'm telling founders that ask - the quick answer is, the shortsighted VCs will panic and stop doing deals, the good VCs will keep calm and carry on. But, there are a decent number of shortsighted VCs so plan accordingly.
1/ At Spark, we believe the best way to understand is to build. To tinker. To push against the edges of a technology that’s still forming. There’s no better example of this than AI right now. So we are adding a Hacker in Residence for AI, and opening up the process.
So my son says is he gonna go play video games with his friends. I joke that he is “abandoning me.”
He says I can watch his Youtube content to hear his voice and feel like I haven’t been abandoned.
🤨 Yeah.
Discord naysayers can hate crypto. But speak to artists who do what they love thanks to NFTs, and you change from "how is this broken" to "how do we make it work"
Web2 reduced the value of a creator's work to begging for likes, Web3 restores it. 🧵
Shoutout to everyone in the NFT photography space. I have found so much love, support, and inspiration from each and every single one of you here, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for all of us 🤝 Happy Sunday, friends.
@justinkan
1. Lockdown until you have testing & tracing, that should be the goal. Anything else and R spikes, many die.
2. Locking down OR economic hardship is a false choice. Those that manage the virus will have the best recovery & economy.
3. Sweden ain't what you think it is.
Local business are going to get hit hard. I’m buying gift cards as a small way to help give them short term cash & in return hearing stories of how they’re going to try to manage through for them and their workers. If you have the means, it’s a small act to help.
Today was never going to succeed as a coup but I hope folks understand this is emboldening to the Maga crowd.
We have a real conspiracy theory problem. It is deep and threatens the basics of society. Has anyone written or spoken about any possible solutions or approaches?
The center stage for startups is, startups.
VCs may fund & assist, bigcos may partner & acquire, but the core is small co’s trying to survive & build something new.
Too many here are obsessed w/being the main character. Our story should always be on early stage builders.
Happy to announce Spark's investment in
@DescriptApp
. It is a truly transformative creative tool for everyone editing audio & video, which is just about all of us. Instead of a typical post, we decided to use Descript to talk about it (how meta).
@paytonrules
Well 1. it has never been marketed as a remote working product, 2. they do have multiple offices, 3. why the hate? They built a product that helped fill a personal need they had in work collaboration and it worked for more people.
Today we at Spark are happy to welcome
@Fraser
to the team. He becomes the sixth member of our venture team, coming to us from OpenAI and prior to that as a founder himself.
Welcome Fraser!
It would have been SO easy for Mayor Pete to stay in the race to accumulate delegates & power for a brokered convention. That he dropped out now, despite being third in delegates, says so much about his character.
I’ve greatly appreciated
@PeteButtigieg
’s patriotic efforts to unite Americans and his frank warnings about those who divide us. I’m sure this is only the beginning for him. By suspending his campaign today, he’s giving unity a greater chance. I hope others will follow suit soon.
You said you’d only do a startup if it was worth spending a decade putting a dent in the world. No question you did
@kvogt
.
10 incredible years navigating science fiction into reality through insane levels of technical, regulatory, and funding difficulty. And it lives on.👏
There was this time early in blogging days where founders & vcs sharing best practices/hacks/stories felt like a weekly class in “how to startup.”
Now it all feels like content marketing (exhibit a: this weeks downturn advice). What do founders use now for the real story?
The simple test is, when the kid finishes the programming class does their work look like everyone else who has taken that class?
That never happens in an English class or an Art class. Are they being taught to express through code, since that is the joy.
There should be more on how the kids & adults who play video games are coping better with 2020. What a delicious reversal of the lonely gamer stereotype.
Games like Fall Guys, Amung Us, Minecraft, Roblox and many more are a bright beacon of human connection in an isolated world.
SF board meeting at Embarcadero today.
Seeing teams in person is just ridiculously better. The energy and connection is just not even the same universe as video. Different sport.
Second, ran into three people coincidentally in just an hour. Density matters.
Long SF
Congrats
@focalsbynorth
on the sale to Google.
@srlake
is the most dogged founder I’ve known. 2012👨🎓, founded Thalmic & max credit cards, 2013 🔥 Series A out of YC (photo), to brink of death & pivot, then raises $120m🎢, 500+ employees & now they’ll launch Focals 2.0 at Google.
It’s a crazy time in venture: new entrants, disruptive models, generational change, $ influx, and it is very hard to make a firm prediction on how it plays in the next decade.
It’s so great.
May the stale die away, and the most agile and best for founders survive. Love it.
@kylegriffin1
A Pyrrhic victory (/ˈpɪrɪk/ ( listen) PIRR-ik) is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. Winning a Pyrrhic victory takes a heavy toll that negates any true sense of achievement or damages long-term progress.
@hunterwalk
Team team team. Santo was board member and lead on Oculus, Postmates I don't think we would have won without Bijan by my side, Sonder referred by Andrew and worked on with Kevin.
Had a gut-wrenching conversation with a founder last week, who broke the news to me that they are having to lay off a key senior executive, likely cutting off some product lines, and then pretty deep layoffs. #
#blog
#
@semil
I think this reflects your peer group of VCs getting older and more conservative, which naturally happens. It takes huge energy to keep backing first time founders. Personally, I will always do it.
Generative AI is the innovative force to creatives they said NFTs would be.
Descript, Midjourney, SD, Hugging Face, etc will create a rebuild of the creative process on par with Adobe, Aldus, Corel, Macromedia in the 90s. Software rebuilt w/human pilot & generative AI co-pilot.
After Dune (of course), would love Villeneuve to tackle Snow Crash or Diamond Age.
He seems to get a scifi book is about the world acting on the characters, not just the other way around. I think he could pull it off.
@DavidSacks
Any free society that does not have some limit on speech will not remain free that’s the paradox of tolerance. The key is for us to fight for that limit to be narrow and clear. But sedition would fall under any definition so this feels like a clear case.
Sanity tip for twitter use, 2020.
If the tweet starts by using a in-or out group signal (“millennials” “VCs” “media” “new yorkers”) that argument is part of the problem.
Post Trump I’m trying my best to reject the tribalism, skip the tweet & hang w/folks that do the same.
The common refrain is how screwed up our kids are gonna be because of social media. But I watch my teenage son navigate it all, knowing how to tune it out, not to fall for the triggering, and realize anyone over 16 is at a distinct disadvantage, and over 30 even worse.
Founders: the fundraising advice from your successful boomtime friends & investors is likely wrong for this market.
Find a founder who struggled but won over their favorite investor. Frontier tech CEOs know whats up.
It’s a game of long shot bizdev, not market-making sales.
There were no new startups which originated in the last five years in the US whose product got > 1 million monthly active users.
This has been an anomaly, where each such previous 5 yr segment (since 1995) always saw many 1MM+ user products emerge.
Many lessons from this era..
@ashleyfeinberg
Can confirm I have done this. High stakes way to gamble for a whole aisle on wide open flights. If you lose there are free seats to move.
Being clear and upfront about the riskiest part of your startup can, paradoxically, help you raise money. VCs know it's not perfect. So being upfront with not just "why to invest" but also "what bet are you taking" shows self awareness, and clarifies the conversation.
Delaying sharing materially negative information as part of the fund-raising process, whether you are VC or a Founder, usually makes things worse. Better to know asap about mutual fit before you waste a bunch of time, especially now.
Everything is being rethought, new leaders emerge, new relationships formed, new communities form, all on a very rapid pace. Trying to be in that weekly community scrum, when so much is serindipity, is just hard with limited fidelity of online only. That is when cities excel.
.
@YasminRazavi
and
@willreed_21
have long been key members of Spark. We’re thrilled to announce both have been promoted to GP. We’re grateful for their superb work with founders and are excited about their future contributions to Spark and our community!
I've had several Jewish friends ask about my perspective on things as a Palestinian. This is a kindness and a welcome reach for empathy, but I did not grow up under occupation.
So over time I gathered this list of books about the lived experience of Palestinians.
These are…
Latest Apple Airpods Pro and Apple Watch represent what Apple does best, last mover advantage to make subtle UX adjustments that make a huge difference. Amazing work. But fwiw, still wish it was Doppler and Pebble I was wearing. Still waiting for the next great HW company.
Re: Korea defeating Germany, thus allowing Mexico to progress to the next round--this video of Mexican fans bumrushing the Korean embassy in Mexico City to thank the ambassador personally, and forcing him to down tequila shots is so beautiful and perfect 😂
#KORGER
I get it. The bay area was burning me out too. But the next stage doesn't mean it snaps back to 2019. It's a new chapter, and it's likely what you've been waiting for.
The perception you have to be at any particular party or part of a particular group to “make it” in NY, SV or anywhere is nervous FOMO. There are many tribes, the best form their own.