Upfront disclosure: I am long both Bitcoin and Ethereum (personally and also indirectly via USV). In preparation for the annual meeting at USV, we have been putting together some slides on the cryptocurrency market. Looking back at the last year I was most surprised by the run-up in Ethereum as part of the ICO craze. I did not see that coming to nearly the extent that it did. While the ICO is an important innovation, there has definitely been an excess both in the amount of money raised for s...

Upfront disclosure: I am long both Bitcoin and Ethereum (personally and also indirectly via USV). In preparation for the annual meeting at USV, we have been putting together some slides on the cryptocurrency market. Looking back at the last year I was most surprised by the run-up in Ethereum as part of the ICO craze. I did not see that coming to nearly the extent that it did. While the ICO is an important innovation, there has definitely been an excess both in the amount of money raised for s...

I last wrote about Blockstack early in 2016 when the team announced the goals of the project. Since then a lot of progress has been made. The team has released a browser which is now available for Mac, Windows and Linux. They have published several papers, including a couple in peer reviewed journals. The latest paper introduces the Blockstack token. In the meantime people have started to build applications using the BlockstackJS framework. If you are interested in writing an application you ...

I last wrote about Blockstack early in 2016 when the team announced the goals of the project. Since then a lot of progress has been made. The team has released a browser which is now available for Mac, Windows and Linux. They have published several papers, including a couple in peer reviewed journals. The latest paper introduces the Blockstack token. In the meantime people have started to build applications using the BlockstackJS framework. If you are interested in writing an application you ...

So last Uncertainty Wednesday we encountered a random variable that does not have an expected value. Now if you read that post you might ask, was this just an artificially constructed example or do random variables like that actually occur? Well the example I gave was an extreme form of a power law, which are distributions increasingly found in the economy as we transition to a digital world. Due to network effects, the winning company in a space has many times the size of the runner-up and t...

So last Uncertainty Wednesday we encountered a random variable that does not have an expected value. Now if you read that post you might ask, was this just an artificially constructed example or do random variables like that actually occur? Well the example I gave was an extreme form of a power law, which are distributions increasingly found in the economy as we transition to a digital world. Due to network effects, the winning company in a space has many times the size of the runner-up and t...

Last week was a big week for us at Union Square Ventures. We had the MongoDB IPO on Thursday and on Friday Rebecca Kaden announced that she has joined USV as a partner. Rebecca is a New Yorker and after nearly a decade on the West Coast, she is looking forward to coming back here. You can read more about it in Rebecca’s own words over on the USV blog. I am super excited for today’s Monday meeting because it will be the first one with Rebecca!

Last week was a big week for us at Union Square Ventures. We had the MongoDB IPO on Thursday and on Friday Rebecca Kaden announced that she has joined USV as a partner. Rebecca is a New Yorker and after nearly a decade on the West Coast, she is looking forward to coming back here. You can read more about it in Rebecca’s own words over on the USV blog. I am super excited for today’s Monday meeting because it will be the first one with Rebecca!

I spent much of yesterday morning at the NASDAQ for the IPO of our portfolio company MongoDB (now trading as MDB). This is a big milestone for technology companies in New York. We have had New York IPOs before, including Etsy in our portfolio, but MongoDB is the first core technology (as opposed to applied technology) company that’s based in New York city to reach this milestone. As someone who came to New York in 1999 at the height of the dotcom bubble, when it first felt like the city could...

I spent much of yesterday morning at the NASDAQ for the IPO of our portfolio company MongoDB (now trading as MDB). This is a big milestone for technology companies in New York. We have had New York IPOs before, including Etsy in our portfolio, but MongoDB is the first core technology (as opposed to applied technology) company that’s based in New York city to reach this milestone. As someone who came to New York in 1999 at the height of the dotcom bubble, when it first felt like the city could...

I ended the previous Uncertainty Wednesday post asking whether an expected value always exists. Going back to the definition, the expected value is the “probability weighted average of a random variable.” So let’s construct an example of a random variable which does not have an expected value. We will consider a probability distribution with infinitely many discrete outcomes, in which the first outcome has probability ½, the second ¼, the third 1/8 and so on. This is a valid probability distr...

I ended the previous Uncertainty Wednesday post asking whether an expected value always exists. Going back to the definition, the expected value is the “probability weighted average of a random variable.” So let’s construct an example of a random variable which does not have an expected value. We will consider a probability distribution with infinitely many discrete outcomes, in which the first outcome has probability ½, the second ¼, the third 1/8 and so on. This is a valid probability distr...

I woke up this past Friday (the 13th) to a DM on Twitter saying that Continuations was down. I immediately tried to open the site on my phone and was greeted by an ominous:At first I figured that maybe Tumblr was down. A quick check of other Tumblrs revealed that not to be the case. At this point a somewhat queasy feeling started to set in. After a quick shower I went to my laptop and tried to log into my account only to see a terrifying sight:At this point I was in a full blown state of pani...

I woke up this past Friday (the 13th) to a DM on Twitter saying that Continuations was down. I immediately tried to open the site on my phone and was greeted by an ominous:At first I figured that maybe Tumblr was down. A quick check of other Tumblrs revealed that not to be the case. At this point a somewhat queasy feeling started to set in. After a quick shower I went to my laptop and tried to log into my account only to see a terrifying sight:At this point I was in a full blown state of pani...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means. I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die). Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 … 5.8, 5.9, 6.0. But with a sample size of 100 there are 501 possible values for the mean. So with the same number of samples (100,000...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday we dug deeper into understanding the distribution of sample means. I ended with asking why the chart for 100,000 samples of size 10 looked smoother than then one for samples of size 100 (just as a refresher, these are all rolls of a fair die). Well, for a sample of size 10, there are 51 possible values of the mean: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 … 5.8, 5.9, 6.0. But with a sample size of 100 there are 501 possible values for the mean. So with the same number of samples (100,000...

I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyllIdyll is a tool that makes it easier to author interactive narratives for the web. The goal of the project is to provide a friendly markup language — and an associated toolchain — that can be used to create dynamic, text-driven web pages. Idyll helps you create documents that use common narrative techniques such as embedding interactive charts and graphs, responding to scroll...

I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyllIdyll is a tool that makes it easier to author interactive narratives for the web. The goal of the project is to provide a friendly markup language — and an associated toolchain — that can be used to create dynamic, text-driven web pages. Idyll helps you create documents that use common narrative techniques such as embedding interactive charts and graphs, responding to scroll...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability distribution is 3.5 but we saw that the sample mean can deviate substantially from that on a small sample. In particular, with 10 rolls we got sample means both close to 1 (almost every roll is a 1) and close to 6 (almost every roll is a 6). The fact that the sample mean itself is ra...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, we started to look at the behavior of the mean of a sample by repeatedly drawing samples. We used a sample of 10 rolls of a fair die. We know that the expected value of the probability distribution is 3.5 but we saw that the sample mean can deviate substantially from that on a small sample. In particular, with 10 rolls we got sample means both close to 1 (almost every roll is a 1) and close to 6 (almost every roll is a 6). The fact that the sample mean itself is ra...