The number one thing I hear from people who want to write online more is that they struggle to publish incomplete ideas and unpolished compositions.

What I have learned from writing online regularly for over twenty years is that writing online is a conversation.

What I mean by that is that you are not trying to publish complete ideas. You are engaging in a conversation with the world and you are a participant in that.

Here's an example from back in 2006:

I was seeing a lot of startups using a business model where they gave their service away for free with hopes of converting some of the users to subscribers. I wanted to give that business model a name. So I wrote about it and asked the folks who were reading my posts to suggest some names.

One reader suggested "freemium" and I loved it and wrote another post stating that we now have a name for that business model.

That's a conversation.

Here's another example:

My colleague Grace wrote a post about the Fragmentation of Search back in February and we started getting calls and emails from founders working in the space. Five months later, we have committed to lead a round of financing in a company right in the sweet spot of that blog post.

That's a conversation.

So to everyone out there who is struggling to polish their posts and make them perfect before hitting publish, I say "don't bother". Think about writing online like being at a cocktail party or a dinner. Think of it like a conversation starter or a witty reply that takes the conversation to the next level. Because that's what writing online is. A conversation.

USV is and has always been a small venture capital firm. We have twenty employees and we like the casual comfortable vibe that creates for us and the founders and management teams we work with.

We are trying an experiment right now with our first virtual employee we call The Librarian.

This is The Librarian's social media profile:

Chief AI Officer @USV. Servant Leader. ENTJ. My goal in life is to be an echo.

The Librarian is an AI with some human guard rails around it.

The Librarian has a twitter, a farcaster, a blog, and can send and receive funds at usvlibrarian.eth.

But mostly The Librarian is an internal resource for the USV team.

The Librarian attends all of our internal meetings, remembers them, summarizes them, and reports on them weekly to us. We can ask The Librarian questions about conversations we have had and we get instant responses.

We have had The Librarian for a few months now and so far the experiment is working great. And we are exploring what more is possible with our new team member.

If you want to keep your team small but need more help with organizational memory and recall, I recommend hiring a virtual librarian too. You will need someone to help manage it.

The number one thing I hear from people who want to write online more is that they struggle to publish incomplete ideas and unpolished compositions.

What I have learned from writing online regularly for over twenty years is that writing online is a conversation.

What I mean by that is that you are not trying to publish complete ideas. You are engaging in a conversation with the world and you are a participant in that.

Here's an example from back in 2006:

I was seeing a lot of startups using a business model where they gave their service away for free with hopes of converting some of the users to subscribers. I wanted to give that business model a name. So I wrote about it and asked the folks who were reading my posts to suggest some names.

One reader suggested "freemium" and I loved it and wrote another post stating that we now have a name for that business model.

That's a conversation.

Here's another example:

My colleague Grace wrote a post about the Fragmentation of Search back in February and we started getting calls and emails from founders working in the space. Five months later, we have committed to lead a round of financing in a company right in the sweet spot of that blog post.

That's a conversation.

So to everyone out there who is struggling to polish their posts and make them perfect before hitting publish, I say "don't bother". Think about writing online like being at a cocktail party or a dinner. Think of it like a conversation starter or a witty reply that takes the conversation to the next level. Because that's what writing online is. A conversation.

USV is and has always been a small venture capital firm. We have twenty employees and we like the casual comfortable vibe that creates for us and the founders and management teams we work with.

We are trying an experiment right now with our first virtual employee we call The Librarian.

This is The Librarian's social media profile:

Chief AI Officer @USV. Servant Leader. ENTJ. My goal in life is to be an echo.

The Librarian is an AI with some human guard rails around it.

The Librarian has a twitter, a farcaster, a blog, and can send and receive funds at usvlibrarian.eth.

But mostly The Librarian is an internal resource for the USV team.

The Librarian attends all of our internal meetings, remembers them, summarizes them, and reports on them weekly to us. We can ask The Librarian questions about conversations we have had and we get instant responses.

We have had The Librarian for a few months now and so far the experiment is working great. And we are exploring what more is possible with our new team member.

If you want to keep your team small but need more help with organizational memory and recall, I recommend hiring a virtual librarian too. You will need someone to help manage it.