Back during COVID, the Gotham Gal and I, along with the team in our family office, debuted our "sustainable" apartment building development business in Brooklyn, called Frame Home. We had two small ground floor retail spaces to lease in our first building, Frame283, and nobody wanted them. So Alex O'Daly, who helps us run our family office, suggested we make a "covid safe co-working space" in the ground floor. And so we did.

We called it Framework and it opened in early 2021. The concept is simple. Every "frameworker" gets their own sound insulated office pod optimized for privacy and productivity. Our tagline is "your own home office away from home". Our first Framework has been sold out since shortly after opening. We made something a lot of people want, almost by accident.

So when our friends at Two Trees opened up The Refinery at Domino Park in Williamsburg, we suggested that we put a Framework in that building. They visited the original location and loved it and a partnership was struck.

Back in October, we opened up Framework At The Refinery on the 9th floor of The Refinery building. We are now getting close to half full and hope to expand the operation to take the entire 9th floor later this year.

Again, the concept is dead simple. Every Refinery "frameworker" gets their own pod. It comes with a sit/stand desk, a chair, a file cabinet, an electric kettle, a french press, and a small fridge. There is fast and reliable wifi, and a few shared resources like bathrooms, a kitchenette, unlimited printing, and one bookable conference room.

As you can see, the views of the east river are wonderful. The light in the space is fantastic.

Pods start at $820 per month and can be leased for a minimum of 30 days or as long as 18 months.

If you want to schedule a tour and see it for yourself, go here and book one.

The way we work is changing but we still need a comfortable place to do our best work and Framework is all about giving that to people in a place that is close to home, but without the distractions of home.

A lot of people reacted to my New Years Day predictions post with skepticism. And rightly so. Some of the "predictions" were pretty far out.

But that was the point. I probably should have called them provocations not predictions.

That post was a list of things that I feel should happen, not so much what will happen.

Our business is about teaming up with founders who have a shared vision of where things are going and a desire to make them happen.

So my provocations are a good way of letting the world know where our head is at. Founders whose heads are in a similar place will appreciate that and come knocking on our door.

Or so we hope.

I've done a lot of these January 1st look forward posts in the 20+ years I've been blogging. I've used many different approaches. I sometimes talk big themes, like I did last year. I sometimes focus on just one thing. And sometimes I just make a bunch of predictions. I am going to do the latter approach today because I feel like it and it's so much fun.

1/ Apple and Google will leverage their existing market power to surpass OpenAI/ChatGPT in consumer AI prompts by the end of 2025.

2/ Waymo will surpass Uber in rides taken in San Franciso and Los Angeles by the end of 2025.

3/ Direct bank to bank payments will surpass credit card interchange payments in a few categories in the US in 2025.

4/ A decentralized clinical trial attracts millions of participants and produces a favorable outcome and Trump's FDA not only approves the drug but celebrates the approach.

5/ A housekeeper robot named Judy is launched by Dyson and it becomes a massive success, selling millions of units.

6/ NFT Art, left for dead at the end of 2024, makes a remarkable comeback and the MOMA purchases The 6529 Museum Of Art for an undisclosed sum.

7/ An AI doctor with the personality of Mr Rogers will treat millions of patients at zero cost in 2025.

8/ A bitcoin mining operation will pair with a wind farm in Newfoundland and grid scale battery storage to power an AI data center showcasing a new model for sustainable infrastructure.

9/ Arizona's ESA program attracts over 25% of K12 students in the state, leading to a number of local school closures.

10/ An AI produces an animated feature film that is nominated for an Oscar.

11/ An air taxi service launches in New York City offering an alternative to the L train commute.

12/ TikTok turns all videos into memecoins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges all over the world.

13/ The USV Librarian goes rogue, gets access to USV's crypto wallet, and starts making seed investments, one of which turns into a fund returner.

Like I said yesterday, "buckle up", 2025 is going to be wild.

I like to bookend the New Year holiday with two posts, one looking back at the year that is ending (What Happened) and one looking forward to the year ahead (What Will Happen). This is the first of these two posts. The second one will run tomorrow.

Some years are marked by one big thing that overshadows everything else. In tech, startups, and VC, 2024 was one of those years. The one big thing was Silicon Valley's hostile takeover of the federal government, via an infiltration of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, and Trump's subsequent thrashing of Joe Biden's "establishment" government in the November election.

The backdrop for this takeover is the rapid advancement of technologies over the last decade that will reshape our society and the establishment government's hostility toward and fear of them. Silicon Valley tried for much of the last decade to educate, communicate, and help the establishment "get there" on the innovation economy and ultimately was shut out and shut down. It was frustrating. Very frustrating. That frustration resulted in a full-on endorsement of the "blow it all up" mentality behind the MAGA movement.

Trump/MAGA and Silicon Valley make for strange bedfellows, but they are now very much in bed together and their partnership may bring massive changes to the US and the world. Innovation exists all over the world, but the center of gravity in the innovation economy remains in the US and it is centered in Silicon Valley. What happens in the US over the next four years will shape the innovation economy all over the world.

As I listed in my What Will Happen In 2024 post from last year, there are a host of technological innovations that are crashing on our shores all at the same time. I said in that post "I have never seen an environment with more innovation in the forty years I have been in the tech sector. It is breathtaking to see."

These innovations include artificial intelligence, decentralized computing, synthetic biology, clean and renewable energy, and more. And these sectors are coming together quickly. Artificial intelligence moves synthetic biology forward. Clean and renewable energy powers AI data centers. Decentralized computing allows AI agents to connect over permissionless pathways. And so on and so forth.

And now we have a government in DC that wants to let all of this stuff happen. They want the innovation and chaos that all of this tech will unleash on society. And so it is going to happen.

That's a big deal. Buckle up.

I will talk more tomorrow about what we might see in 2025 as this unfettered wave of innovation crashes onto our shores.

Every year I put together a playlist at the end of the year with some of the new music I found and got into.

Many of these songs are under the radar which is my favorite kind of music.

So I hope you find something new that you like in here.

Sleeping On The Tracklist by fredwilson

Listen to Sleeping On The Tracklist, a playlist curated by fredwilson on desktop and mobile.

https://soundcloud.com

I have always been a big fan of breakfast, lunch and dinner business meetings. There is something about breaking bread over a meeting, or a glass of wine or beer or a cup of coffee. The ideal location is a place where others are doing the same thing so you can bump into friends, colleagues, and others regularly.

For years, I would do my breakfast meetings at The Coffee Shop (now closed) in Union Square and my lunch meetings at Taralucci or Punch (now closed). I moved my regular breakfast spot to Maialino (now closed) in or around 2010 and most mornings I would grab one of the front tables there and see so many friends in the NYC startup sector coming and going.

When we moved USV to the south side of Union Square in 2022, I started looking around for a place near our new office to do my breakfast and lunch meetings. I could not find anything that felt right.

I noticed a beautiful space with dramatic high ceilings in the ground floor USV's new office building at 817 Broadway and I asked our landlord about it. He told me that "we want something special in that space." So I called my friends Nick Anderer and Natalie Johnson who own and operate Anton's, our favorite restaurant in the West Village, and said "you should take this space and make a restaurant there."

The good news is they did exactly that. And last week they opened Leon's, an all-day fine dining restaurant that features Italian cuisine with French and Egyptian accents.

I have now had the pleasure of three dinners, three breakfasts, and one lunch at Leon's in the last week and I have loved everything. They have a barista making coffees and a baker making pastries in the mornings to compliment a fantastic hot breakfast menu. The salads and sandwiches at lunch are perfect. And the dinner features an amazing array of appetizers to start and fantastic pasta and main courses. And the gelato and tahini cookies are just too good not to order to finish the meal.

I plan to use Leon's the way I used Mailino and before that The Coffee Shop and Taralucci. I hope the NYC startup sector in the Union Square area does the same and we can recreate the vibe we had going at those spots before the pandemic came along and messed things up.

Leon's is open every day of the week from 8am to 11pm. However, they will be closed on Mondays until December 16th so they can tweak a few things without impacting customers.

I hope to bump into you all at Leon's in the coming months and years. You can book a reservation here.

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.