I posted this on AVC.com today explaining that I've moved here to AVC.XYZ.
Over the last few years, I’ve moved my internet life from web2 to web3 and rarely use any web2 services anymore.
So I am starting a series called “I’ve Moved Onchain” to explain this journey to everyone and today’s opening post is about blogging, naturally.
I’ve blogged at AVC.com for a very long time. I started out in September 2003 at avc.typepad.com but moved to avc.com a few years later.
AVC.com has served me very well over the years but it lacks a few things that really matter to me.
First, the posts are stored in a closed database hosted by me in the cloud.
Second, the services that I use to create AVC.com are not “composable” meaning that others cannot build things on top of AVC.com and the services that create and display the posts I create here.
Third, the identities of the authors (me) and readers (you) here at AVC.com are not tied to any sort of portable identity and reputation system.
While none of these issues may seem like a big deal to you, they are huge deal to me as I will explain in a bit.
So when web3 blogging services started cropping up, I started to use them.
My first rodeo was at Mirror.xyz where I kept avc.mirror.xyz for most of 2021, 2022, and 2023. This was my first post at avc.mirror.xyz on March 18, 2021.
I really wanted to blog at AVC.xyz and that became an option for me in November 2023 when I joined Paragraph.xyz and wrote this Hello World post.
These web3 blogging platforms store all of my posts onchain at Arweave. These posts are available to anyone to read regardless of what blogging platform I use. And if I get abducted by an alien and fail to pay my hosting service, they will still exist onchain. Forever. That’s a huge deal to me.
They are also composable web3 services. Any developer can take what I create at AVC.xyz and build on top of it. That’s also a huge deal to me. My partner Nick describes the composability benefit so well in his post today on USV.com.
And my identity and the identity of my readers are mapped to a web3 wallet address that authenticates who they are, what they do onchain, and allows developers to create reputation systems on everyone. Given my fight with spam and trolls and jerks and assholes that largely drove me away from blogging and commenting in the latter part of the last decade, this last bit really matters to me.
At the start of this year, I took everyone who receives an email when I post here at AVC.com and imported that email list to Paragraph.xyz. So a lot of the AVC readers have been getting emails of my posts at AVC.xyz this year. But even so, I still get a ton of daily traffic here at AVC.com and I have not posted anything new here since January 10, 2024.
I do not plan to post here at AVC.com going forward, but I will keep the archive up and I may choose to cross-post a thing or two here whenever I want to reach the broadest audience.
My home for blogging is and has been onchain for a while now and if you want to follow my writing, please go visit avc.xyz and subscribe to receive my blog posts via email by clicking the green subscribe button on the upper right.
But what about Mirror.xyz and avc.mirror.xyz? you might ask.
Well, I am also thrilled to be able to say that Mirror and Paragraph have merged and these two leading web3 blogging services will now be one. And, as you may know or suspect, USV has invested in both of them and now will be a major shareholder in the merged company. I am very excited about that. Here is Paragraph’s blog post about the transaction and here is Mirror’s.
The team that built Mirror.xyz is now turning their attention to a new app called Kiosk and they blogged about that today. So USV is now also an investor in that project.
Over the last thirty years, our lives moved from offline to online. They are now moving onchain. That’s a wonderful thing and I hope you will join me in moving onchain as well.
The New York City startup community is way more diverse than the other leading technology hubs in the US. According to a 2022 report from the Center for an Urban Future and Tech:NYC: Black and Hispanic New Yorkers make up 20.8% of New York’s tech sector workforce, compared to 8.5% in the San Francisco Bay Area and 9.7% in the Boston/Cambridge area. While this level of diversity represents a competitive advantage for New York over other tech hubs, it is still a far way off from New York’s overall demographic numbers.
So Tech:NYC, where I am the Chair, launched a program yesterday to tackle this head-on. They call it Startup:NYC and it builds upon the success of their Founder House, which launched in summer 2023 to give New York tech founders a space and programming to facilitate connection and collaboration with peers, investors, and industry experts. Over the first two cohorts of the program, Founder House has hosted 80+ founders, 63% of which are BIPOC-identified, and 46% identify as women.
Startup:NYC is about building a community of diverse founders who can together build the next generation of great startups in NYC. Go here to see the range of programming, events, and community that founders in NYC can access via Startup:NYC.
Our family's public charity, Gotham Gives, along with Tech:NYC, puts on the Annual NYC Computer Science Fair with help from the broader tech community in NYC.
The Fair happened yesterday at the Armory in Washington Heights.
The Fair brings together about 2000 NYC public high school students who are studying computer science with about fifty tech companies and about twenty colleges and dozens of after-school CS programs. It was described to me yesterday as a "science fair meets a job fair" and that's exactly right.
The idea is to show NYC public school students, many of whom are from families with no connection to the tech sector, that they are candidates to work in tech if they take the right classes, work hard, and develop skills that make them employable.
We have been putting on the Fair since 2013 and even did two virtual fairs during the pandemic. The in-person ones are a lot better!
I had the pleasure of touring NYC School Chancellor David Banks around the Fair mid-morning. We stopped at about a dozen booths and rooms and met a bunch of students, teachers, tech companies, and non-profits working in CS Education.
That's the Chancellor doing a robotics project with some young women from Forest Hills who compete in a robotics tournament under the name Metro Joules.
My favorite moment of the tour was a visit to the Dream Machine which is a visual AI experience built by the Bright Moments DAO which is in the USV portfolio.
That's a student "prompting" the Dream Machine with a story about Spiderman playing pickup basketball. The students enjoyed coming up with dreams and prompting the Dream Machine to display them on the big screen. On the way out, the Chancellor and I discussed how technology like this could be used in helping students learn.
It gives me great pride and satisfaction that we can put on a day like this for the students of NYC. It could not happen without the leadership of Jennifer Klopp, who runs Gotham Gives, and the Tech:NYC team. And we are incredibly grateful for the financial support of our sponsors; Etsy, Justworks, Warby Parker, Kickstarter, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Uniswap, SoundCloud, Splice, Deloitte, Pilot Fiber and Primary VC. And huge thanks to all of the companies, universities and non-profits that had booths at the Fair this year.
