I have worked with many former lawyers in my career and my experience with them has always been fantastic.

The first former lawyer I worked with was Milt Pappas who, along with his partner Bliss McCrum, were my first bosses in venture capital and they taught me so much.

Milt told me that he believed that a legal education was a fantastic preparation for the business world. Milt had attended law school but never practiced law. He went right into a trust and estates department at a leading bank in Cleveland Ohio, where in the 1960s he became acquainted with private investments and that led him to doing deals with some of the earliest VCs. In 1970, he and Bliss started Euclid Partners and that's where I got my first job in venture capital. Milt taught me so much about being a minority investor, being a great board member, balancing responsibilities to our portfolio companies and our investors, and so much more.

Three of my partners at USV are former lawyers, John Buttrick, Andy Weissman, and Samson Mesele. are great investors and great partners.

I have helped quite a few former lawyers move from legal careers to working in startups. I have found that they are often great business partners to early-stage founders. They can take on many roles, including finance, HR, business development, business operations, and, of course, legal. I am not entirely sure what it is about a legal education, but I feel that it prepares people to be effective across a range of activities.

I have run into business leaders who see a legal background on a resume and pause. They think it is a limiting background. I feel the opposite about it. I see it as a sign of range and capability. Particularly with people who left the practice of law early or mid career.

So if you need someone on your team who can take all of the administrative functions off your plate and run with them, consider a former lawyer. It is a bit of an unconventional move, but I think it is a strong one.

For many years, I took a multivitamin every morning and that was it. Then maybe five years ago, during my annual physical, my doctor told me I was "very vitamin B deficient." That led to a month or so of regular injections in my thigh and I've taken Vitamin B12 every day since.

Over time, I added Vitamin D3 to my daily routine. A friend on the golf course told me to try Glucosamine for my aching knees and so I added that. My dermatologist told me to add Niacinamide to my daily routine and so I did. My friend Gordon told me to start taking Omega 3s and that was added.

And now I've got a "supplement stack." I take six supplements every day and Zinc every other day. Here it is.

That link and image is powered by our portfolio company Supp's new mobile app. You use the app to read the bar codes on your supplements and it creates a stack for you. It is shareable, obviously. And you get ratings and recommendations. Here's mine:

I don't take Supp's recommendations as gospel. I share them with my doctor and a few friends who are way more into this than I am. So I may or may not be adding Lycopene and Turmeric to my stack. But I do appreciate the recommendations. And may incorporate them.

At USV, we are totally bought into patient centric health and wellness. We believe that each and every one of us should own our wellness and wellness data and the health care industry should revolve around us not the other way around. Which, unfortunately, is where we are today. Supp is a piece of that. Starting with supplements.

If you want to download the Supp app and give it a try, iOS is here and Android is here.

I have written a bit about our portfolio company Blackbird but in case you didn't read any of those posts, Blackbird is a loyalty and payment network for the hospitality sector. You earn Fly and you pay with Fly. The more you pay with Fly, the more Fly you earn. Pretty simple and pretty awesome. Blackbird is currently available in NYC, SF, and Charleston South Carolina. If you live in or visit these cities, you can download Blackbird here.

I was using the Blackbird app this week and took a look at the "Where to Blackbird" map in the app and saw this:

When you are building a network, density matters a lot. Whether it is a social network, a real world network (like Blackbird), or some other kind, the value of the network goes up massively as density increases.

Metcalf's Law says that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users on it. Whether that is exactly right or just directionally right, it is clear that network value is non-linear and that more is better. In a real world network, it is not just more, but more in the right places. Which is why density matters so much.

The Blackbird team launched the network in lower Manhattan and have been building it out in ever larger circles since launch. The result is a very dense network where they launched and increasing density in adjacent neighborhoods.

The wrong thing would have been to launch Blackbird globally all at once. Having one venue in NYC, one in Paris, one in Dubai, and one in Singapore would have been useless. But four on the same block in the Manhattan's West Village created initial utility for everyone on and around that block.

If you are building a network, you need to be intentional and strategic about where you launch it and how you grow it. More is better. But density is key. So get some density and go from there.

When I woke up on Friday, September 27th, the first thing I did was put on an out-of-office notification on my email. That felt so damn good. It meant that for the next twelve days, I was dialing work down to the bare minimum and going away with The Gotham Gal to recharge and refresh.

We spent five days/nights in Seoul and another five days/nights in Tokyo. It was the first time for us in Seoul and the third time in Tokyo (and more broadly Japan). We did no work meetings and largely spent time together just the two of us. We walked more than 150,000 steps, took dozens of subway rides, and saw lots of both cities. We shopped, ate, drank, and soaked up the people and the culture as much as we could.

We are not "hire a driver/guide" tourists. I appreciate that approach to travel and have done it a few times with friends who prefer to travel that way. But when the Gotham Gal and I travel by ourselves, we do a ton of research and then get on our walking shoes and throw ourselves at the city. I particularly like taking the subway because that is where you see the people going about their daily routines. It gives you a sense of the people and the culture.

We ate in the food markets, the lunch spots with people on their lunch break, and also in some of the best restaurants in Seoul and Tokyo. I had a full Japanese breakfast (see the photo above) every morning in Tokyo. There is nothing like a Japanese breakfast to start your day off right.

We really like to shop in Korea and Japan. Many of our favorite designers are from there and they are creative without impacting the comfort and wearability of the clothes. So we did a ton of shopping and came back with lots of great stuff to wear this fall and winter.

It's a long flight there and back. The time difference from NYC is thirteen hours so the jet lag is no joke. But it is a great trip, the people are amazing, and the culture is quite different from what we have in the west and very compelling to us.

We had a great time and hope to go back soon.

When you think of founders who have been massively successful in bringing new and novel technologies and companies to market, you don't normally think of a nomad who has been living out of a single backpack for over a decade. You don't think of someone who talks like a modern-day Peter Kropotkin. You don't think of someone who walks through life with a childlike wonder for bugs, plants, and animals.

But that is exactly who Vitalik Buterin is.

I had the pleasure of attending the premier of Vitalik: An Ethereum Story on Wednesday night at the Angelika Film Center in NYC.

This film is nominally about the Ethereum blockchain and developer ecosystem. But it is actually an opportunity to spend just under ninety minutes with Vitalik learning about him and how he lives, thinks, and how he became who he is.

I have been in and around the blockchain sector for almost fifteen years. I am a fan and a holder of Bitcoin. I am a fan and a holder of Solana. I am a fan and a holder of Ethereum. I am a fan and a holder of many other protocols, tokens, and communities. I am all in on all of this.

But I will say that Vitalik has a special place in my head and heart. He doesn't just talk a good game. He lives his beliefs and leads from there. He is a very special human. And this film does a great job of showcasing that.

This film was funded by an Ethereum crowdfund on Mirror.xyz and is now being streamed onchain at ethereumfilm.xyz. If you want to stream it, you go there, mint an NFT for $20, and can stream it on your computer or on your TV if you connect an HDMI cable or airplay to AppleTV. The proceeds of the NFT sales will go towards getting a distribution deal with a major streamer so that this film can reach the general public.

Here's a trailer if you want to try before you buy:

I think the general public needs to know about Vitalik. The narrative around crypto, blockchains, and web3 is mostly about speculation and scamming. Vitalik is the opposite of all of that and his story can help the mainstream understand this sector and the potential of it.

So if you want to meet a very special human being, take some time this weekend and stream Vitalik: An Ethereum story. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Code is a mobile app built onchain that allows anyone to send anyone else money anywhere in the world and it is entirely self custodial. Code uses the Kin token that came out of the Kik mobile messaging app. The Code team are the same folks that built Kik and Kin. I've been working with them for almost a decade and a half and it has been a wild and fun ride.

You need the Code app to do anything with Code but once you have it, it is slick. You can download Code here or by scanning this QR code:

One of my favorite features of Code is the tip card. Here is mine:

If you have Code on your phone, you can also go to https://tipcard.getcode.com/X/fredwilson

Anyone who has the Code app can scan that card and tip. Everyone who has Code has a tip card. Your tip card can go in your social profile on TikTok, Twitch, etc. You can send it via a messaging app. Or, like I just did, you can put in in a blog post.

Micropayments has always been one of the most exciting onchain use cases for me. And as we are seeing all over web3 now, tipping is leading the charge for micropayments. I think that's awesome.

A friend of mine stopped by the USV office the other morning and asked me about startup mortality rates. Her business sells to startups and big companies in roughly equal measure and she told me they were seeing a rising rate of startups closing up (and thus churning as customers). While churn is never good, you really can't beat yourself up too much about your customers going out of business. She wanted to know what we are seeing.

Our portfolio has been relatively free of startup mortality in the last couple of years but it is something we expect for, plan for, and underwrite for.

I have always said this, on my blog and in person, about what we have seen at USV and what I have seen in other early stage venture funds I've worked on and invested in:

1/3 are good investments

1/3 turn into something but you wish you hadn't made the investment

1/3 are zeros

Another friend of mine asked me a similar question via email this week and pointed me to something out of Nate Silver's book, On the Edge.  Nate breaks down risk in data driven ways and uses as examples poker, venture capital, crypto, etc.  The book quotes some figures from Marc Andreessen wherein he outlines that a16z's funds perform as follows (note: he also broadly says these are 'top decile' fund performance numbers, too): 

• 25% of investments make zero return (i.e. 100% write offs)

• 25% produce a return greater than zero but less than 1x (i.e. are losses)

• 25% produce a return between 1x-3x

• 15% produce a return between 3x-10x

• 10% produce a return of 10x or greater

If you bucket the first two as "zeros" or near zeros, the third one as "something you wish you hadn't invested in" and the last two as good investments, you get to roughly the same 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 that I like to use.

Of course, these are numbers over a very long period of time. Startup mortality rates rise and fall based on the vibrancy of the overall fundraising market and at times will be higher and at times will be lower.

But if you look at the data over a very long periods of time, you see that a small percentage of investments produce all of the returns. And that has always been the case for the fortyish years I have been in early stage venture capital.

Maybe that will change but it hasn't yet.

A lot of folks who are new to the venture capital business and are building their own firms and funds will email or message me about reserves and recycling. I am happy to engage with them on these very "inside VC" topics because I believe they matter a lot when managing venture capital fund and firm.

For those of you who are not VCs, you may find this irrelevant. Or you may find it interesting. For those who are in venture capital, I think you should understand these topics so I hope you find this valuable.

Early stage venture investing is like poker. You make a small initial investment, which is like the ante in poker, and you get a seat at the table. Then you watch the founder and team execute until they need more money. That is like the first set of cards you get. Then you get the chance to invest more money. That is like putting more chips on the table. This repeats a few more times and eventually the company succeeds or fails. That's like the river and the reveal.

In order to play the hand correctly, you need to have reserves. You can't invest all of your money in the ante. You need to have more chips so you can keep seeing more cards. A lot of investors, particularly newbies, don't understand this and run out of money too early in a deal and don't get to keep investing in their best companies. That's like not being able to play your best hands in poker. That's a disaster since you only get a few of those.

So at USV, we make sure we always have sufficient reserves for each and every portfolio company. We do this by building a sophisticated model of each fund and the fund's portfolio of investments and the expected capital needs of each and every business over a long period of time along with probabilities associated with each and every round and we run simulations to predict what the fund will need to reserve to support each company and we raise a new fund when our simulations tell us we need to do so.

In this way, we always have enough reserves for each portfolio company so we don't get tapped out.

We also recycle capital at USV. This means that for any given fund, we will keep the returns we get on early smaller exits and put them back into the fund. This increases our reserves capacity but it also means that we invest more money in our portfolios than we raised, including the management fee load. If a $200mm fund can actually invest $250mm and gets a 3x on that $250mm, it generates a 3.75x on the $200mm that was invested by limited partners. That has a hugely positive impact on returns.

Reserves and recycling are two techniques that can significantly enhance the returns on a venture capital fund. We use both of these techniques at USV. They are built into our culture, our DNA, and our processes.

You cannot produce a top decile fund with just reserves and recycling. You need to be working with great founders and teams who are building breakout companies. Just like a poker player needs to get dealt some great hands. But how you play those hands when you are dealt them is also critically important. I have seen early stage VCs make way too little on their best companies because they ran out of money and could not keep on participating or they had to sell too soon or some other reason that was effectively poor portfolio and fund management.

Reserves, recycling, and returns go hand in hand. So build them into your firm's culture and processes. They make a difference over the long run.

I have long been interested in displaying digital art on the walls in my home and office. I wrote this back in 2017 and this when we opened our new USV office in 2022.

I have digital art running on off the shelf displays in many places that I live and work and it brings me endless joy. I also run view.art on the second screen on my desktop when I don't need it for zooms and the like.

Here is some digital art on the TV in our family room:

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x0a1bbd57033f57e7b6743621b79fcb9eb2ce3676/35000046

But there are issues with the tech needed to make all of this work and I've been eager for something simpler that would be easy for everyone to use.

Today the Bright Moments community is opening view.art to the public and anyone can use it. USV has been an investor in the Bright Moments DAO for the last three years and I've watched them evolve the technology they use to put digital art on screens and make it better and simpler. View.art means that the technology that Bright Moments has used to run some of the most important digital art shows all over the world is now available to everyone.

View.art allows anyone to run a digital art collection in a browser and showcase it on any screen that can be connected to a browser. The digital art needs to be "onchain" (aka NFTs). That makes the art publicly accessible because all onchain assets are.

Here are some of my collections:

https://view.art

view.art

Curate and showcase onchain art anywhere

https://view.art

view.art

Curate and showcase onchain art anywhere

The first one is a channel I made using view.art. The second one is the vault where I keep my favorite NFTs.

If you have an old laptop or mac mini, you can connect that to a screen, fire up a browser, and show off your art.

If you don't have a spare computer to use, you might try a yodeck, which is a tiny raspberry pi computer we use at USV for our NFT screens, and put the view.art URLs into the yodeck dashboard and get them onto your screen that way.

Many smart TVs have browsers in them and if you have one of those, you most likely can just put the view.art URLs directly into them.

Of course, you can showcase art you don't own as long as you know where to access it. View.art has already curated a bunch of collections on their home page.

So if you want to showcase your digital art or someone else's digital art on a screen in your home or office, I encourage you to try view.art. I think you will like it.

I took the last two and a half weeks off from work and blogging (and a lot more) and attended the 2024 Paris Olympics with much of our family. It was a fantastic experience and a great vacation too.

Although I've watched the Olympics with excitement since I was a kid (and so has the Gotham Gal), neither of us had ever been to an Olympics. So a few years ago, we decided to take two weeks off mid-summer in 2024 and go to Paris and attend the Olympic Games. It was a great decision.

We saw eleven events over eighteen days and also took a vacation within a vacation and rode the train to the beach for a few days in the middle of the first week. We timed that getaway perfectly as we avoided the two warmest days in Paris of the entire two weeks.

We were concerned about the heat in Paris in August when we planned the trip last year. Much of Paris is not air conditioned and many Parisians head out of town for August to go to the beach or the countryside. But we got lucky. It was sunny and warm for most of the two and half weeks we were there but not hot and steamy.

Paris did an incredible job hosting the Olympics. The metro ran perfectly the entire time we were there and it was very well marked where to transfer and get off to get to the various venues. The events and venues were well-staffed and there was always someone you could ask (in English) where to go.

Place de la Concorde, a huge open plaza right in the center of Paris, was turned into the center of the Olympics and they held a bunch of "urban sports" (break dancing, 3x3 basketball, skateboarding, etc) there.

There were venues all around Paris and even out in the suburbs (like Equestrian at Versailles). We only went to venues we could take the Metro to although we got to see parts of the suburbs of Paris that we had not visited before like La Defense and Saint-Denis. We came away from this two weeks with an even better feel for a city where we have visited many times and have owned two apartments in over the last twenty years. That was a big win for us.

Paris was pretty quiet which is typical of August and it was clear that many Parisians had left town. But about half of the places we like to go out to eat, drink, have coffee at, etc remained open and it was pretty easy to get into anywhere we wanted to get into.

The events were full. Even though many of the locals had left town, the tourists filled the seats. We saw people from all over the world, particularly China and Japan, and European countries like Netherlands, Germany, and Italy were also noticeable.

But of course, we were there for the events and they were great. We saw beach volleyball, track and field, swimming, diving, table tennis, regular tennis, gymnastics, break dancing, and a lot of basketball.

Here are some of my favorite photos I took of the events

It was great to see the Olympic athletes, including former Olympic athletes, at all of the events. They come to compete but they also come to support the rest of their team. Many are there for the entire two weeks and they are out and about. That is really great to see.

We learned a lot about how to do an Olympics right. Some events are great in person. Others not so much. If you don't know a lot about an event, it really helps to have the commentator telling you what's going on. That is particularly true of events that are judged.

We saw a lot of gold medal matches/finals/etc and the corresponding medal ceremony. That's a great thing to see and I'd encourage anyone going to the Olympics in the future to make sure to see some of that.

I'd also say that you don't need the full two weeks to experience the magic. We had friends who came for the first week and loved it. And we also know people who came for the second week to see some of the finals and that was great too.

I am so glad we took the Olympics plunge. We are veterans now and are seriously considering going to LA in four years. If you live in LA, I would encourage you to stay in town and go to some of the events. It is a really special experience.