One of my strongly held beliefs is that new technologies often spur (and sometimes demand) new business models. And these new business models can often open up entirely new markets.

In web2, we saw freemium (a word that was invented here at AVC) and marketplace models (like crowdfunding) that unleashed entirely new ways of monetizing businesses and hobbies as well.

Writing (blogging, newsletters, etc) has struggled to establish a new business model that properly rewards and aligns writer and readers. The longstanding advertising and subscription models have certainly worked to generate revenues and profits, but they have also led to a host of issues (like clickbait, paywalls, etc) that are deeply problematic.

So I've been wondering if we can learn something from tokenizing a writer's work and letting the writer and the readers benefit from that tokenization. I don't know if this new business model will scale and work, but it might.

And so when Paragraph, where this blog is hosted, launched writer coins yesterday, I decided to launch an $AVC coin to see what might happen.

As part of that launch, Paragraph let me allocate $AVC rewards to long time readers, subscribers, etc and so if you are one of those, you should have gotten an email that looks like this:

I realize that in this day of Internet scams, many of you will be suspicious of that email. I should have written this post before sending out the rewards. I am sorry about that. But please do trust that email and claim your rewards.

If I can drive the value of $AVC with my writing, then all of you who read my work can benefit too.

And that's pretty exciting to me.

USV posted yesterday that we are looking to hire a builder who can lead our transformation into an AI-native venture capital firm.

Here are the key paragraphs from that post:

You’ll be the builder-in-chief: prototyping tools that help us source founders earlier, synthesize markets faster, and operate more intelligently. You’ll stand at the edge of what’s possible with language models, embeddings, and retrieval systems—and bring it back to Earth in the form of working tools that matter.

This role isn’t about writing research memos or consulting decks. It’s about building. You’ll be hands on, writing code. You’ll ship things. You’ll experiment constantly, and you’ll shape the future of USV from the inside.

If you are a builder who wants to operate at the intersection of technology and startups or know someone who is, go here for more information on this opportunity.

The Farcaster community gets together every year in a community-produced event called Farcon. It took place the first few days of May this year in Brooklyn. Dan Romero, co-founder and CEO of Farcaster, asked me to do a fireside chat with him and while I'm trying to do less of this sort of things these days, that was an invitation I could not resist.

Dan took me on a trip down career memory lane. The result is a powerful argument for protocols over platforms.

See for yourself. It's just over thirty minutes and there are quite a few highlights in here.