Two weeks ago, I traveled to Split, Croatia to speak at the Shift Conference, a large gathering of entrepreneurs and hackers from eastern and southern Europe. I had a great time meeting folks from that part of the world, and it was awesome to spend two days at the beautiful Croatian National Theatre in Split. For my talk, I wanted to get a little macro and look at where we are in the cycle of the installation and deployment of the "information and telecommunications era", and how that connects with how we are looking at the investment landscape at USV. Here's the video of the talk.  My main point that history may not repeat itself but it does rhyme, or put another way: same old song, this time in a different key.  If you watch the first two minutes of the video you'll get an illustrated take on that starting with J-Lo in 2002 and getting all the way back to Herbie Mann in 1974: I'll give a quick annotated review of the talk here:

Macro Cycles

USV's original investment thesis was heavily influenced by economist Carlota Perez whose research detailed the life cycle of new technologies as they enter and penetrate society.  Perez found that fundamental new technologies -- the kinds that radically re-shape the economy and society -- tend to follow a common pattern, which she breaks into two phases: installation and deployment.  The installation phase is characterized by wild exuberance and exponential growth, as a new technology breaks onto the scene and the early leaders take hold.  The deployment phase, which typically occurs after some sort of blow-up (in the market or in law/regulation/society), sees the technology penetrate all corners of society, slowly but surely re-shaping norms, laws, customs, regulations, etc. Looking at the last ~40 years of computing and the internet (26 years now since the birth of the WWW), we can see this cycle play out, perhaps with the dot-com bomb of 2000 marking the inflection point:

Looking at the shapes of the curves during these two respective phases, you'll notice that the farther we get into the deployment phase, the more the rate of growth flattens out, as the technology is better understood and therefore de-risked. Perhaps the specific dates shown here are right, or perhaps not -- you could argue that the "deployment phase" really didn't take hold until mobile was firmly in place (2008 ish), but the point is really just that: at this point, the overall operating model of web+mobile is understood, and the world is well along in adopting it and applying it to all things. Another way of saying that is that now, in the deployment phase of the web+mobile era, the incumbent industries from the previous era (the industrial era) are all facing intense competition and are under threat of being re-shaped in the web+mobile model:

  At the same time, however, we're seeing the other end of the cycle begin to play out: we now have "new incumbents" representing the web+ mobile model.  This is Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook (from the first big wave of desktop applications), and now Uber, Airbnb, Instagram etc (from the second wave of mobile applications). Now that these new incumbents have staked out their territory, we're in the middle of the traditional cycle of technology power wars as big platforms duke it out, and new insurgents try to poke holes in their grip:

  I'm not prepared to say that today's "new insurgents" (essentially blockchain companies and others that are challenging incumbents on data control practices) necessarily represent the next great surge, but there is undoubtedly a serious amount of activity that's focused on disrupting the "traditional" web+mobile model, as opposed to further deploying it farther into society/industry. So to summarize, the two big forces we're focused on at the moment are the deployment of the web+mobile model, reshaping the communications architecture of every industry, and the disruption of the web and mobile model, challenging the new incumbents based on their data architecture:

Photo: Rudy (Loïs) Pignot

I am in Paris this week for OuiShareFest, and spoke yesterday morning during the opening session.  OuiShareFest is in its third year as a large international gathering of folks interested in the peer/collaborative/sharing/networked society, put on by the community organization OuiShare. The topic of this year's fest is "lost in transition", and the prevailing feeling from the community here is a growing concern about the relationship between peer economy platforms and participants, specifically regarding distribution of value, control, etc.  This is not really a big surprise, given the huge financings and staggering valuations that many corporate platforms in this space are putting up. At the same time, the rise of the blockchain as an application platform has put a lot of people (ourselves at USV included) on to the possibility of a practical, functional alternative to centralized web services. So, whereas I gather that the tone of the first OuiShareFest in 2012 was unabashedly glowing about the peer economy in all its forms, this year's fest is much more pensive and reflective about the power dynamics built into web platforms, and in particular their relationship to established power in the form of capital investment. For my talk, I wanted to take this issue head on, place it in a historical perspective, and help people think practically about what might come next and how to get there. I'll give a condensed, annotated version of the talk here:

The title "venture capital vs community capital" is an intentionally provocative strawman.  The point I want to make is that of course there is a natural tension here, but it's not a brand new dynamic, an either/or choice, or a zero-sum game. Rather, it's part of a recurring pattern that we can see dating back decades (if not much longer) in the history of technology.  Viewed this historical lens, we can see the patterns of this cycle and use them to help us understand where the viable opportunities will be in this phase.

But first, I want to point out that the reason we're all here is that we believe in the power of networks -- of the connected society -- to expand knowledge, deliver economic opportunity and solve big problems (energy, health, education, etc) in ways that haven't been possible previously. Right before my talk at OuiShareFest, Robin Chase went on and made a compelling plea for us to come up networked, scalable solutions (both venture-backed and community-backed) to the biggest issues facing the planet today, her biggest one being climate change.  I am a firm believer that this model will continue to have profound, deep impacts on how we live, how we work, how we learn, and what we make, and that we are still in the very early stages. But, as we become more and more familiar with this model, we're starting to pay more attention to the particular architecture of these networks, and the power dynamics built into them.

1/ The Problem (opportunity)

So, the problem that many in this space have identified is a growing concern about the imbalance of power between peer economy platforms and the participants they support, especially as the most mature platforms (Airbnb and Uber being the elephants in the room, but there will be many more) grow to be very large, wealthy and powerful companies. The problem is essentially one of trust.  And specifically in the case of peer economy platforms and workers, it's about economics and control.  One way to think about this is that as this space has matured, platforms have a tendency to "thicken" -- to do more, take more, and exert more control.   So the question becomes, are participants here getting a fair deal, and do they have an appropriate amount of freedom and control?  There is a growing sense that they may not be, and that alternative architectures need to be investigated. While this may feel scary to many observers of the space, especially those coming at this from a public interest perspective, we shouldn't be surprised to see this happen.  Rather, this is what always happens as companies explore new spaces and establish profitable business models. So rather than look at this phenomenon simply as a brand new problem to be solved today, it's more useful to see it as yet another phase in a recurring cycle, that presents both known challenges and known opportunities. Looking back at the history of major tech platforms over the past 30 or so years, we can see this cycle turn (note: this is not intended to be exhaustive or complete):

(Note: the green boxes are companies, and the blue bubbles are "open" technologies like free software and open protocols -- i.e., venture capital and community capital, respectively) IBM and AT&T once had a monopoly on the PC and the telephone network, respectively, which was opened up by the PC clones and the modem going over-the-top of the telephone network (not to mention the government break-up of AT&T). Next, Microsoft had a lock on PC software through Windows and Office, and AOL (along w Prodigy, Compuserve, etc) had the online market locked down.  This lasted until the proliferation of Linux and IP protocol stack, which poked a hole in Microsoft's desktop OS as well as AOL's walled garden, giving us the open internet. Then, on top of that newly open platform, today's leaders in web (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc) and mobile (Apple, Google, Xaomi) built their businesses.  It's worth noting that, with the exception of Android, there hasn't been a really meaningful hole poked in the business positions staked out by this generation of companies (though there have been attempts, such as Diaspora for Facebook and Pump.io for Twitter) Finally, we're left with today's peer/sharing/collaborative economy marketplace platforms.  These are the new, venture-backed companies staking out territory and building what will become the next generation of powerful incumbents.  And while we have seen the beginnings of open protocols that directly challenge their power (like the La'Zooz ridesharing protocol), it's all very very early. So there's the pattern: tech companies build dominant market positions, then open technologies emerge which erode the the tech companies' lock on power (this is sometimes an organized rebellion against this corporate power, and is sometime more of a happy accident).  These open technologies then in turn become the platform upon which the next generation of venture-backed companies is built.  And so on and so on; rinse and repeat. So, all that is to say: this is not a new thing.  And that seeing this as part of a pattern can help us understand what to make of it, and where the next opportunities could emerge.

Given this moment in the cycle -- where we have a small number of large and powerful platforms in some sectors, and a growing sense of discomfort about that power -- how might people who affect change go about doing it? In this section, I want to really stress the "how do you get there part" more than the "what might an alternative architecture look like" part.  It's quite easy to imagine a "driver-owned uber" (as many people here have suggested) in its fully realized form, but it's much more difficult to think about how such a thing might come into being.  The history of technology is strewn with failed attempts to replace closed/proprietary systems with open ones. Here, I'll point out four ideas that may be helpful in thinking about this:

“Convenience trumps 
just about everything”  -- Steve O'Grady, analyst at Red Monk (link)

Today at OuiShareFest, Aral Balkan from Ind.ie talked about a major failure of the open source movement over the past several decades: to sacrifice short-term usability and experience for long-term (and abstract to most people) freedoms.  He framed this problem as "respect for experience" and "respect for utility" (or something along those lines) as the two partner values along with respect for human rights.  I would agree with that, and anyone following this space can note the failure of past attempts at open platforms that just weren't usable enough (for example: openID).

"The Lindy Effect is real. 
Disruption is rare. 
But it does exist and it is caused by non-linear changes in technology." -- Albert Wenger, USV (link)

My colleague Albert discusses the Lindy Effect: the idea that every day that a platform idea exists extends its expected overall lifespan.  In other words, technologies and ideas have momentum -- the longer they're around the longer they'll stay around.  It is possible to "disrupt" them, but that requires a profound, non-linear technology change.  And even then, they don't just disappear overnight.  For example, Microsoft has endured two decades of disruption from the web -- first against Windows as the dominant OS, and then against Office as the dominant productivity suite -- but it still alive and kicking.  So the disruption that challenged Microsoft didn't put them out of business, but it did open up the market for many many many others to enter.  Looking at today, Uber clearly isn't going anywhere, though "open" challenges to them could open up the market for others. To my mind the non-linear change in technology that has the greatest potential to challenge today's incumbent platforms is the Blockchain (and related decentralized technologies) that are in the process of externalizing data from web and mobile applications (more on that below).

"Your margin is 
my opportunity" -- Jeff Bezos

This profound idea is not new to the business world, but it's nevertheless instructive for new technologies looking to compete against the new incumbents.  Along the lines of "convenience trumps everything", cost matters.  For example, I met a blockchain entrepreneur/hacker recently who was incensed about the margin that Etsy takes on transactions (and to most people Etsy is about as fuzzy bunny as you can get as a large web platform).

"The first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block" -- Satoshi Nakamoto (link)

This is a line from the original Bitcoin white paper, and I include it to point out the importance of powerful incentives in deploying open technologies.  There are two primary innovations in Bitcoin: 1) the distributed, open ledger; and 2) the financial incentive that drives participating computers to cooperate: mining bitcoins. To the extent that this incentive-to-cooperate model can be extended in other directions, we may be on to something big.

3/ What we're looking for

Given all of the above, here are a few things we're looking for at USV: Collaborative platforms in greenfield sectors To the first point about the value of networks (to society), there are many many important sectors still operating under inefficient bureaucratic hierarchical models, which are ripe to be re-architected in a network model (I'm thinking energy, health, education, and many others). I suspect that these sectors will be developed by "traditional" networks (e.g., venture-backed, centralized networks), as these have the ability to move the most quickly, to experiment with new models (failing often), and to help train sectors/cultures that a networked model is possible. Worker support services A major concern with the emerging power of web platforms (especially in the collaborative/sharing space) is worker power.  We are already beginning to see platforms emerge to serve workers in this environment (e.g., SherpaShare, Coworker, Peers, the venerable Freelancers Union, etc) and will see many many more here. My belief is that "union 2.0" will be a platform, more than an organization, and its power will derive from the data leverage it's able to attain over the the platforms that employ its workers. Thin platforms One way to challenge "thick" platforms is to build "thin" platforms that do less, take  less, and exert less control.  We have invested in several of these (DuckDuckGo, compared to Google, Twitter, compared to Facebook, Sidecar compared to Lyft, etc) and are looking for more.  Often times, "thin" also means decentralized in some way, pushing power, economics and control further out to the edge. New protocols Finally, new protocols that radically re-architect power, information and control.  Inspired by Bitcoin and the blockchain, there is now tremendous energy in this space.   It's early early days, but it does feel like this has the potential to become the next "open layer" that washes over the latest generation of big companies (see the diagram above) and cracks open the market even further. At USV, we've made several small investments in this space (OneName, and two that are not yet announced), and are looking for more.  It's not clear yet where value will accumulate at this layer, and much of it may and should remain as "community capital" in the system. In conclusion: we are at a really interesting time with the maturity of the large web and mobile platforms, the rapid expansion of peer/sharing/collaborative platforms, and the emergence of distributed protocols.  All of this has raised really interesting questions about innovation, global problem-solving, economics and control, and the discussion here will undoubtedly lead to short- and long-term impacts on how and what we build.

A while back, I wrote about Anti-Workflow Apps -- apps that solve problems for you without forcing you to adopt a workflow that you may never fully be able to adopt.  Workflow apps (CRMs, to-do lists, project management tools) are super hard to drive adoption towards, as everyone works differently and really resists this kind of change.  (of course, it's possible when the reward is super good -- e.g., slack and git/github -- bit those times are rare and more often than that an attempted re-workflow goes splat) So I've been on the lookout for Anti-Workflow tools.  Solutions that solve a problem that you think requires a new workflow, but may actually be more effectively solved another, more clever way Today I want to talk about to-dos, because I seem to have found my own personal anti-workflow solution. I've always struggled with to-dos -- I've used every to-do management tool on earth, and have never been able to adopt a workable, effective system.  I've tried everything from complicated tracking systems like OmniFocus to simple to-do lists of every possible flavor.  Nothing has stuck.  For years and years, I kept trying, trying and trying again. In the end, I just gave up and said, fuck it, I'm not using a to-do list anymore. Not going to even try. What happened was that I ended up keeping track of my priorities in a totally different way -- a way that was actually more in tune with my existing workflows.  One part of the solution was pretty obvious, and one was surprising. On the obvious side: the calendar.  For things that I absolutely must do, and that require dedicated time, I just use my calendar.  I'm in my calendar all day long, so it's the perfect place to block out time for important things.  So now I set calendar entries for myself, to make sure I set aside time for things that need focus. The calendar is good for things I know I need to do, and that I know are important.  What it's not good for is capturing notes, ideas, and small to dos, which often just need to be captured in the moment and prioritized & dealt with (or not) later.  This is the use case that has always drawn me back to to-do apps, to no avail. In particular, the really bad thing about a to-do list for this use case is that all it does is make you feel guilty.  Items get added to the list, and whether you really need to do them or not, you feel drawn to.  And then when it doesn't happen the to-do list just becomes a giant pile of guilt that you do your best to ignore (that's what happens to me at least). That brings us to the less obvious solution.  What I've found is that a great way to handle both the capture / prioritization issue and the guilt issue is to use a Sparkfile.  Long time readers will know that this blog is named after my favorite idea from Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: the "slow hunch" approach to developing ideas.  Another idea from that book -- unearthed by studying epic thinkers of the past like Darwin and DaVinci -- is the Sparkfile: a long, running list of thoughts & ideas.  Fragments that pile on one another over time. One way to cultivate the slow hunch is not only to keep a sparkfile (in addition to other kinds of journals), but to constantly pour back through it re-reading and reconsidering your previous thoughts, ideas and observations. Turns out that this is also a pretty good way to filter inbound ideas of things to do.  Just add them to the spark file, continually review the list, and occasionally do things (immediately or via calendar), and then add new stuff to the top as you think of more things.  No pressure -- and absolutely no expectation -- to do everything on the list or turn it into a perfect set of priorities.  Just let the mind run, capturing as you go. For me, this idea ties back into anti-workflow because I've been keeping a personal blog/journal for about 7 years now.  Which was in many ways a sparkfile, though it started out slightly more long form (starting with a private wordpress blog).  The big revolution happened last fall, when I switched over to using Diaro.  Diaro is a personal journal tool, with both a desktop web client as well as a mobile app.  The mobile app is the key, as it makes it possible to really quickly jot down a thought -- as quickly as you'd do on a to-do app, or email, or notepad. So in the end, the solution to my to-do workflow was not to add a new to-do workflow.  Rather, it was to extend the workflows I already had going, calendars and the sparkfile.  Boy it feels good.

I couldn't sleep last night, and was up around 4am lurking on Twitter.  I came across an old friend, Elizabeth Green, who is an accomplished and awesome education writer -- you've probably read some of her recent NYT mag cover stories, and it turns out she has a new book out, Building a Better Teacher.  I know Elizabeth because back in 2008 at OpenPlans, we worked with her to launch GothamSchools, which eventually spun-out and became Chalkbeat. I said to myself: oh yeah, that was such a great project; I had totally forgotten about that. So awesome that it is still up and running and thriving.  And I dutifully headed over to update my Linkedin profile and add it to the section about my time at OpenPlans. During my nearly 6 years at OpenPlans, we built a lot of great things and accomplished a lot, and I'm really proud of my time there.  But it's also true that we made a ton of mistakes and invested time, money and energy in many projects that ranged from mild disappointment to total clusterfuck. Looking at my LinkedIn profile, I started to feel bad that I was only listing the projects that worked - the ones that I'm proud of.  And that's kind of lame.  The ones that didn't work were equally important -- perhaps more so, for all the hard lessons I learned through doing them and failing.  So rather than be ashamed of them (the natural and powerful response), I should try and celebrate them. So I decided to add a new section to my LinkedIn profile -- right under my work history: Self.Anti-Portfolio.  Projects that didn't work.  I started with things we did at OpenPlans, but have since added to it beyond that. Here's the list so far:

• OpenCore (2005-8) - a platform for organizing/activism. Hugely complex, too much engineering, not enough product/customer focus, trying to be a web service and an open source project at the same time and basically failing at both. (now http://coactivate.org)

• Homefry (2008) - platform for short-term apartment sharing.  Seemed like such a great idea. A few friends and I built a half-functional prototype, but didn't see it through. Maybe a billion dollar mistake. (more here).

• Community Almanac (2009) - platform for sharing stories about local places. Really beautiful, but no one used it (http://communityalmanac.org)

• OpenBlock (2010) - open source fork of everyblock.com, intended for use by traditional news organizations.  Stack was too complicated, and in retrospect it would have been smarter to simply build new, similar tools, rather than directly keep alive that codebase (https://github.com/openplans/openblock)

• Civic Commons Marketplace (2011) - a directory/marketplace of open source apps in use by government. Way overbuilt and never got traction.  Burned the whole budget on data model architecture and engineering.

• Distributed (2014) - crowd funding for tech policy projects. Worked OK, but we discontinued it after brief private pilot.

Looking through this list -- and there are certainly ones I've forgotten, and I will keep adding; trust me -- what I noticed was: in pretty much every one of these cases, the root cause was Big Design Up Front - too much engineering/building, and not enough customer development.  Too much build, not enough hustle.  Another observation is that these were mostly all slow, drawn-out, painful failures, not "fast" failures. I thought I learned these lessons way back in 2006!  That was when I first read Getting Real, which became my bible (pre-The Lean Startup) for running product teams and building an organization.  The ideas in Getting Real were the ones that helped make Streetsblog and Streetfilms such a big success. And they are what helped me understand what was going wrong with the OpenCore project, and ultimately led me to disassemble it and start what became OpenPlans Labs. But it turns out the hard lessons can lurk, no matter how much you think you've taken them to heart.  Perhaps tracking the Anti-Portfolio in public will help.

A few weeks ago as I was walking down Beacon Street in Brookline, I happened upon something amazing: The Society of Grownups. The Society of Grownups is a self-proclaimed "grad school for adulthood", the idea is to give people the tools they need to manage their grown up lives.  The primary focus is on financial literacy and counseling, but it also includes other kinds of classes and programs. This is something I've wanted for a long time.  I am dumbfounded that we don't have more financial / grownup education early in our lives. I graduated high school without as much as a word about earning / saving money, what credit cards mean, etc.  I suppose, like sex ed, financial ed is one of those subjects that people are just supposed to figure out on their own, or maybe learn from their parents.  It's just that it's so important -- if you think about it it is preposterous that this is not more of a focus at all levels of learning. Of course, there is no shortage of financial services for people who are well off -- and I'd argue that the prevailing mindset is that you need to have money to talk to someone about money.  Which makes sense, in a way, but is also fundamentally wrong, and a contributing factor to why it's expensive to be poor. Point is, I've been hoping to see services like this crop up. Not only is it an important social issue, but I suspect it can be a really good business in its own right. The Society of Grownups is one attempt -- at the moment, it's not attempting to be a web-scale effort, but rather is small and personal.  In-person coaching, classes, and community.  Ranging from $20 for a 20 minute session with a financial coach, to $100 for a 90 minute session, to a range of pricing for classes and events. I signed up for a 20 minute financial coaching session (first one is free), just to get a feel for it.  My coach came in with a big "Don't Panic" sticker on her notebook -- this is one of their slogans.  We talked through our situation, concerns and goals.  It was really helpful and refreshing.  I wish I had done this 15 years ago when I was in college (and every month since). Another player in this space that I've been curious about it LearnVest -- they are going with the web-based approach; the yin to TSOG's yang.  I got a little stuck in the LearnVest onboarding -- there's nothing wrong with it, but it's just the standard email back-and-forth plus phone calls.  There is something nice about just being able to walk into a place and talk face-to-face.  But I suspect that I'll like LearnVest as well.  They do direct integration with your bank accounts (a la mint), and use the coaching to help you come up with a strategy and a plan. Anyway, this is all very encouraging, and I hope both of these efforts and others can get traction.  So much of the country, and the world, is so fucked and adrift in terms of money. And while there are clearly macro forces at play causing much of that, there's also the potential for everyone to get smarter and better about how they manage on a month-to-month basis, and I hope we see more and more companies finding a business model that serves them.

When I first started to learn programming, about 15 years ago, I remember being surprised at how easy it was for me to get focused and stay focused.  I loved (and still love) the feeling of getting lost in a project, and could easily spend hours upon hours "in the zone". No procrastination, no resistance, only focus and enjoyment.  It was easy for me to find Flow. Part of why this surprised me so much is that I had always struggled to achieve (and still do) a similar state when writing.  Dating back to the first paper I ever wrote (maybe 4th grade? Certainly 6th grade), the feeling I most associated with writing a paper was terror, dread, resistance, and avoidance.  Procrastination station. Programming and writing are pretty similar activities, so I often think about what makes programming such a joy and writing such a chore (for me at least). Recently, the answer has been revealing itself to me, as I've been seeing a mindfulness therapist. Mindfulness centers around the practice of noticing your thoughts -- developing a kind of "meta awareness" -- so that you can then develop more control over how you react to your thoughts.  In other words, often times, the thing that troubles us isn't our direct experience, but rather our reaction to that experience.  Mindfulness (at least at the stage I'm at) helps you distinguish between the two. So, as I've been working on the mindfulness practice, and at the same time working on a few long-form writing projects, I've been paying a lot of attention to that moment when I find myself resisting the task.  When that feeling rises up in my belly that pushes me to turn away, break focus, check my email, snap out of whatever Flow I may have achieved. And each time that happens, I've been trying to take a second and examine that feeling, try and figure out why I'm pulling away -- trying to notice what, exactly, is going on.  It's a really odd thing to do, and is pretty illuminating. As far as I can tell so far, the difference between writing (where I feel the constant pull of avoidance) and coding (where I easily melt into Flow) is a certain form of terror, of not knowing "the answer" -- whether that's a certain wording, and idea, a structure, etc.  Whereas with coding, I don't expect to know the answer, and bring wrong (try, break, repeat, repeat) is just part of the process. Also, I often get intimidated by the scope of a writing project, whereas it's easier for me to tackle programming work in pieces, so no one piece feels looming and huge.  Recently, I've been trying to focus my time on smaller pieces (now I'm going to focus on the outline, now I'm going to flesh out the second section, etc), and have had some success. I am curious if others see this the same way, and/have techniques that work for them? The thing is: writing is powerful, exciting and fun, if I can just get over the hump, and then stay in the zone.  So this is something I'm going to keep working on. P.S.: other places I've found flow: skiing, cooking, doing carpentry/construction work, singing, playing drums, building powerpoint decks, talking on panels at conferences.  It sure is a good feeling.

I had crazy week last week. On Monday, I went to NYC for the day for work, and was overcome by a strange dizzy feeling.  Walls spinning; hard to concentrate; nauseous.  I thought -- maybe I'm just dehydrated. I took a rest during the middle of the day; I drank a lot of fluids.  I made it back to Boston that evening -- barely -- and went straight to bed, assuming all would be clear the next morning. When I woke up, the walls were still spinning, just as they had been.  I started googling.  Now -- it's important to note that I don't have a standard health profile -- 5 years ago, right after our son was born, I discovered that I had several large blood clots, in my intestines and in my head, and I've been seeing hematologists, neurologists, and rheumatologists, and have been on blood thinners, ever since.  As you can imagine, the intersection of "dizziness" and "blood clots" is not a good one. So I headed straight to the ER Tuesday morning, and ended up being scanned, tested, and admitted overnight.  Turns out I did not have a stroke, but rather I have Vertigo caused by an enflamed cranial nerve (likely due to a virus of some kind).  Vertigo is a really strange thing: first, it's amazing how much we take for granted our brain/body's ability to understand and interact with the space around us; when that stops working, it's very distressing.  And second, it's (perhaps even more) amazing how well the brain can adjust, adapt, and re-learn, when certain things stop working the way they had been -- I've been doing PT to re-train my brain, eyes and ears to understand what's moving and what's not moving, and where I am -- and it's been surprisingly effective. But that's not the point of this story.  The point of this story is about how much effort, charm, and determination it takes to get effective medical care -- even in the best case scenario with excellent health insurance, great hospitals, and top doctors. One of the toughest things about last week was getting all of the doctors on the same page with one another. I've got a PCP, a rheumatologist that I used to see in NYC, a history of cat scans and MRIs (from NYC and Boston), a hematologist in Boston -- and now as of last week, a Neurology team in Boston following my case. All of these doctors -- each of whom knows a piece of my story and has expertise to offer -- do not have a way to talk to each other, and their method of sharing information is outdated at best. The result of this situation is a mad scramble.  Trying to get record requests initiated.  Trying to compare new images to old images.  Trying to get the specialists to weigh in with each other or at least communicate at all.  Trying to figure out where the PCP is.  Waiting on hold.  Leaving messages for doctors that don't get returned.  Being scheduled for new cat scans and MRIs that may or may not be necessary -- if only all of the doctors could communicate with one another, and work off of the same set of information. For instance, the day after I was discharged from the hospital -- and we headed to Cape Cod for what remained of our attempted family vacation -- the Neurologist in Boston called and said they noticed something new on the cat scan from two days prior -- and I needed to come back in for another scan.  That meant a 4 hour drive, finding someone to watch the kids (luckily both sets of grandparents were with us), another night away, and another day worrying about what could be.  And it's altogether likely that better communication among doctors -- and easier use of past records -- would have made this unnecessary. Luckily for me, I have a secret weapon.  My wife.  When it comes to medical issues, she has been through a lot -- in particular, a decade of dealing with Chron's disease and Thyroid Cancer.  She has learned -- the hard way -- what it takes to get through the confusion, uncertainty, bureaucracy, under-communication and fear of having a complex medical situation.  She know that you not only need to get connected with the right care at the right time, but you have to be a quarterback, pitbull, and snake-charmer at the same time to get things to happen. In her words, you need to be the sweetest pitbull. Never ever go away or let anyone off the hook, while at the same time, get everyone to like you and care about you. My attitude is a bit different -- I try to avoid being a burden, and tend to assume that people will do their jobs correctly if you let them.  I leave messages. Frannie's approach is different.  On Thursday when we went back for my additional cat scan, we showed up in person at the Hematology unit and the Neuro unit -- unannounced; no appointment.  We tried to make friends with the receptionist (critical).  For a moment, it seemed like she would brush us off, but then she said "well, let me call the head nurse and see if she can come talk to you."  Bingo. The head nurse (an angel if there ever was one) came out and saw us.  Carved out a few minutes to talk.  Mid-sentence, as I was explaining my situation, she ducked out of the room and came back with record requests forms for NYC.  With her other hand, she dialed in the scheduler for the next possible appointment and got me set up. With her other hand, she took down the Neurologist's information so she could coordinate with him. With her other hand, she had NYPH records department on the phone.  With her other hand, she scribbled down her direct line, her pager number, and the Hematologists cell phone number.  She had a lot of hands and she was using them all at once.  Because we were sitting there. When we were done I gave her a huge hug and actually cried a little.  The difference between having a person who knows you, sees you, and can move the gears of medicine for you -- and a person at the end of a phone line or email -- is astounding. And I would never have gotten there were it not for the sweetest pitbull gnawing and smiling our way in. I guess the point of this story is that it shows me how broken the medical system is.  Even in the best case, there is such a lack of communication, coordination and information sharing.  Data is everywhere and nowhere.  Decisions are slower and harder to make than they should be.  Expensive diagnostics are over-used.  Every patient needs their own sweet pitbull to help pry the doors open and get the system to pay attention them and care about them. Thinking about this in terms of apps and data -- it showed me, crystal clear, that there's got to be a better way to do medical collaboration.  What I wanted, throughout all of this, was a simple private chat room for me and my doctors -- all of them -- that provided easy access to my history of records, diagnostics, and care providers, across locations and hospital networks.  A place that let me  -- and them -- ask questions and get answers, and keep everything in one place that everyone could work from.    Of course, there are untold barriers to this vision: insurance, risk/liability, data security.  But it seems obvious to me that that's the future we should be shooting for. In the meantime, we can simply hope to recruit the sweetest pitbulls to have our backs. I know I am super thankful to have mine.

Saying no to things is something I've always been bad at.  I have always been (and to some extent, have prided myself on being) more of a "why not" guy than a "why" guy. This has many of advantages -- I'm open minded and I end up doing tons of interesting things w interesting people.  But it also has some obvious disadvantages -- like feeling overwhelmed, getting behind on things, getting spread too thin, not doing a good enough job on any one thing. I remember reading that one of the cornerstones of Warren Buffet's approach to life is writing up a list of the 10 things you want to do, prioritizing them, then putting the bottom six on a "avoid at all costs" list. And I believe in my heart that the projects / apps / ideas that are tight, focused and well executed are better than the ones that are broadly ambitious and try to boil the ocean. One of my favorite lines, from one of my favorite books is "half, not half-assed". But still, it's hard to say no to things.  Meetings, phone calls, projects, you name it.  It's just hard. But every time I look at my long to do list, or my inbox, or my calendar, and think -- what can I do to be more efficient and effective at doing all of this?  The obvious answer is to just do less.  That's by far the most simple and most impactful approach. How do you save money? Spend less.  How do you save time?  Do less. Easier said than done, but no doubt important.

Last night at USV, we hosted the latest of several recent meetups on the “Peer Economy”.  We are in the process of organizing a number of companies and organizations that represent a certain sector of the internet economy in NYC, with an eye towards building a more formal coalition (perhaps in the model of San Francisco’s BayShare) at some point in the future. As is to be expected, we spent the bulk of the discussion trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that ties us all together.   I think there’s a pretty strong thread, but it’s not immediately clear how best to describe it.  So I hereby invite you, the Internet, into the conversation. So, as a thought experiment, how might you describe the common approaches and values between:

• peer-to-peer marketplace platforms like Etsy, Krrb, Skillshare, Shapeways and Zaarly;

• collaborative consumption networks like Airbnb and Carpooling.com;

• crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and LendingClub;

• co-working and education/development spaces like General Assembly and the DUMBO Startup Lab;

• support networks for independent professionals like the Freelancer’s Union;

• communications and media networks like Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud and StackExchange.

At USV, we have a word for all of this, which is simply “networks”.  That’s great and effective as an investment thesis, but it’s actually rather abstract as way of communicating the idea widely.  In Steven Johnson’s recent book Future Perfect, he uses the term “peer network”, which is better but still somewhat problematic (as peer means “pier” to most people and “napster” to others).  And our working description, as you can see, is “peer economy”. Anyway, rather than try to “draw a box” around all of this — we instead attempted to (at Matt Brimer’s suggestion) focus on the center — on the core opportunities, values, and methods that all of these communities believe in and operate around. The ones that stood out to me the most were:

• valuing creativity, self expression & individualism;

• increasing personal freedom through community support;

• creating economic empowerment;

• valuing authenticity and real human connection;

• built on trust (as developed within each community);

• and perhaps my favorite: Andrew Wagner’s “as New York as a slice of pizza”

In my world, I focus a lot on words like “innovation” and “networks” — but I think the thing that really stood out to me about last night’s conversation was the centrality of the human component.  Empowering “real people” to do new and awesome things.  To access new economic opportunities for themselves, while at the same time rediscovering community. The idea that stuck in my head last night is about the “Indie Web” — what’s so interesting about the web and the networks of people on it is that they are at the same time individual & independent AND hyper-connected.  The fact that we’re connected lets us be independent.  It’s almost a paradox. I like the idea that the web makes it possible to be an indie musician, dj or filmmaker, to be an indie craftsperson or manufacturer, an indie journalist, publisher, or even an indie scientist. And what makes most (if not all) of this possible is the ability to be an indie entrepreneur, whether that’s through an open source project, a meetup, a web app, or even a venture-backed company (which is, admittedly, a certain flavor of “indie”).   The point is, that on an open web, we have the unfettered ability to make new things that enable people to do new things.  Which is pretty awesome and exciting.

The past three weeks have been really busy. First a trip to SF with the USV team, then to Austin for SXSW to put on We Heart Wifi, and finally to Iceland where we have been helping establish a new institute for internet policy at Reykjavik University. So as is typically the case, I have fallen behind on everything — email, blogging, seeing my kids… But I am psyched to be back home and to have a few weeks free and clear to recenter and get organized. The busier my life gets, the more I’m impressed with folks who are able to keep their heads above water despite ridiculous schedules and fractured time.  It’s not something I’ve mastered yet, but I’m working on it. For the past two months Frannie and I have been taking yoga, and it’s been incredible.  Totally changes my outlook on everything.  We are lucky to have a really great studio and instructor very close to our house.   Perhaps the thing that has stuck with me the most is the idea that the practice of yoga doesn’t end when the session is over.  That, with practice, you can bring the yoga with you wherever you are, to whatever you’re doing.  Sounds hokey, I know, but it’s pretty profound.   Anyway, the point is: I think there is something in there — about how to keep calm and carry on and stay disciplined when things get hectic.  Easier said than done - but a worthy goal.