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.

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."

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. They 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.