USV’s current thesis is:

Enabling trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols.

https://www.usv.com/#thesis-3-0

That last word is powerful but unfortunately less understood than the other words in that sentence.

Protocols have been around forever and are well-understood codes of conduct between people.

In computer science, protocols are the same thing, codes of conduct.

I like this definition of computer protocols from the Cloudflare website:

Standardized protocols are like a common language that computers can use, similar to how two people from different parts of the world may not understand each other’s native languages, but they can communicate using a shared third language. If one computer uses the Internet Protocol (IP) and a second computer does as well, they will be able to communicate — just as the United Nations relies on its 6 official languages to communicate amongst representatives from all over the globe. But if one computer uses IP and the other does not know this protocol, they will be unable to communicate.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-a-protocol/

Protocols have been around for as long as computers, but we are at the beginning of a golden era of protocols that I like to call “web3.”

Until recently protocols were mostly free and unmonetized. We all use the HTTP protocol every day to access web pages. We all use the SMTP protocol every day to send email. But these protocols are free to use and don’t make money for any company or project or individual.

With the arrival of Bitcoin back in January 2009, we got a protocol that had monetization built in.

And since then, computer scientists have been creating web3 protocols for all sorts of things, most of which have a token that monetizes the protocol.

The monetization is not just about enriching the creator(s) of the protocol. It is also used to incentive usage of the protocol and operation of the protocol. In the Bitcoin protocol, that is operating mining computers that secure the Bitcoin network. In the Helium protocol, that is operating hotspots that connect the network. In the Ethereum protocol, that is staking to secure the network. In the Filecoin protocol, that is operating storage systems that provide decentralized storage.

It is the monetization that sustains these protocols and makes them reliable for others to use and build on them.

And with sustainable and reliable protocols, we will get a new architecture of services that will be much more interoperable.

Let’s look at mobile messaging. Most of my friends and family are on iPhones. I use an Android. Messaging does not work very well between iPhones and Android phones. Many people in the world use Whatsapp for mobile messaging. But Whatsapp doesn’t speak to iPhone’s messaging app. Nor does Signal. And Signal doesn’t talk to Whatsapp. And so on and so forth.

If every mobile messaging app was built on a monetizable protocol, that was sustainably reliable because operating it made people and companies money, and if developers were incentivized to build on it so they could also make money, we would have a different situation. All of our mobile messengers would interoperate with each other.

The same situation will play out in every computing sector over the next few decades as these web3 protocols are designed, built, shipped, and built on. We are in the early days of this golden era of protocols, but we already have many working extremely well in the decentralized infrastructure and decentralized finance sectors.

It upsets me that protocols are both so powerful and also so poorly understood by the media, the mainstream, and the government.

The White House recently put out a document that said “crypto assets currently do not offer widespread economic benefits” suggesting that web3 was not economically important to the US. While the economic benefits of web3 are not widespread today, they are quite powerful and will eventually impact every economy and every market. And pouring cold water on them will not make them go away. Thankfully.

I am the Chair of the Etsy Board and have been an investor and board member at Etsy since the mid-2000s. It is a company that I love and get great joy from being part of. Last year Etsy quietly launched a feature that has completely changed the way I use Etsy. It is called Etsy Lens.

Etsy has millions of items for sale in its marketplace but shopping on Etsy is generally not intent-driven. It is idea-driven. Most people don’t go to Etsy and enter “pizza oven” into the search field. A more common search would be “red pillow for my couch.” As a result, searching on Etsy can be a bit of a “hunt and peck” experience, even as the search on Etsy has improved enormously in the last few years.

I was in a coffee shop in a hotel in NYC this morning and saw an antique typewriter that I thought was great. I opened my Etsy app and got the search field.

I clicked on the camera icon and my phone took a photo of the antique typewriter:

I clicked the blue checkmark and Etsy gave me these search results:

I have been using Etsy so much differently since finding out about Etsy Lens. I see things that I like when I am out and about, use the Etsy app to photograph them, search Etsy for similar things, favorite and curate them in my profile, and then buy the ones I love.

When I showed Etsy Lens to the Gotham Gal, she said “Take photos of things you like to find things you will love.” That sums up Etsy Lens so well for me.

Ten years ago, a small group of folks in the K12 Computer Science Education community in NYC decided to put on a “mock job fair” for high school students who were taking computer science classes in the NYC public schools. That was the start of an annual day of engagement and learning for high schoolers considering a career in tech.

Yesterday we got the Fair back in person after three years of not doing it or doing it remotely. And it was so great to be there. This is a picture of all of the students making their way around the various booths learning about careers in tech.

Most everyone in the tech sector would like to have more diverse companies but there are no easy ways to accomplish that. Ultimately we need to get young people interested in careers in tech much earlier in their schooling and show them what those pathways look like.

This photo is of a team from Justworks doing exactly that.

I want to thank all of the sponsors who made this event possible:

And most of all I would like to thank Jennifer Klopp, Executive Director of Gotham Gives, who led the effort to get the Fair back in person this year and the team at the NYC Public School System, TEALS, and Tech:NYC who helped get the students and the tech companies there.

Yesterday was one of those days for me where a lot of the work I do across different areas of interest comes together in a single place and time. And those are great days for me.

I was approached by a company this week that has trained a large language model on all of the blog posts I have written here at AVC. There are 9059 of them for those that are counting. They wanted to offer me a chat bot called “ask Fred.”

I told them no thanks.

Let me explain.

I am totally fine with anyone using all of the content I have produced here at AVC to train their AI models. When I started AVC, I put a creative commons license on the content here. It has always been my view that anything I write here is in the public domain. You can repost it. You can do what you want with it. I just need attribution and a link back to the original post. That’s been my deal since the earliest days of AVC.

But an AI is not me. When you ask me something, you get my brain on the problem.

I have put a lot of what is in my brain onto the page here at AVC. But I have not put all of it.

I also don’t think an AI has my humanity, my ego, my empathy, my love, or my hate.

Maybe someday that will change. But we are not there yet. I think we are a long way from that.

So if you want to ask Fred something, you will still have to approach me.

There has been a lot of discussion about how AIs can make art and possibly replace artists, but I think the opposite is more likely to happen. Artists have been using AI to make art for a while now and the pace has picked up a lot in recent years.

I have always loved the work of Ian Cheng who makes computer-generated simulations that evolve using artificial intelligence. His works change infinitely. The first time I saw that, maybe ten years ago now, it made me rethink many ideas I had about art.

With the introduction of NFTs, artists can now make, release, and sell AI-generated art much more easily.

This week, our portfolio company Bright Moments has a big event in Tokyo, and one of the collections being shown features eleven top AI artists.

Though I could not make it to Tokyo this week, I was able to acquire a number of fantastic works in the collection.

My favorite is this piece by Claire Silver which is one of a series she calls paracosm.

Claire said this about the work:

This collection is a visualization of part of the artist’s paracosm. A text-to-image model was trained on some of their memories of that world and its inhabitants. 

I also quite like Helena Sarin‘s Kogei Kats. I picked up this one:

Helena’s website says that “Since 2021 her main creative energy is directed towards the #potteryGAN – making ceramics using her GAN/AI work as designed to 3D functional objects.” I really dig that.

I am very bullish on the creativity that AI will help artists bring to the world. It is a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera, or a kiln. And they will use that tool to make work that will bring great joy to our lives. They already are.

It has been a long time since I did a Funding Friday here at AVC. I used to do them every Friday. We have funded a lot of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries here over the years. Here are a few examples.

L’Appartement 4F

Land To Sea

There is a new wrinkle in crowdfunding restaurants, bars, coffee shops, bakeries, etc courtesy of USV portfolio company Blackbird, which I recently wrote about.

Blackbird is a loyalty/membership platform for the hospitality industry and it allows operators to issue memberships in-store (at check-in or check-out) or elsewhere. Although Blackbird did not imagine its platform being used for crowdfunding, operators have started to use it that way.

A great example is gertrude’s, a new restaurant in Prospect Heights Brooklyn which hopes to open next month.

gertrude’s is offering anyone the opportunity to become a member in advance of opening and there are three levels of membership:

The benefits of each membership ladder on top of each other and get better and better.

If you live in NYC, particularly if you live in our near Prospect Heights, you can help gertrude’s pay for the cost of opening the store and get your money back in the form of dining opportunities and long-term membership benefits.

This strikes me as a fantastic way for restaurant operators to defray (or ideally fully fund) the cost of opening a new venue. They give up less equity and spend less on raising it and their customers become VIPs and regulars and enjoy the benefits of that. A true win/win.

If you want to help gertrude’s get open, go here and become a member.

This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition.

This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird Labs, which I posted about a few months ago.

Blackbird is a platform for the restaurant industry to build loyalty/membership and related business models on.

Upside Pizza, which makes some of the best slices in NYC, launched the Upside Pizza Club this week using the Blackbird platform.

While a free slice every day for a year is nothing to sneeze at, I am most excited about the idea of the private concert series that Upside is running at its Nolita location over the next five weeks. Pizza, beer, and live music on a summer evening is my idea of a great time. I suspect it is yours too.

So if you live in NYC, you might want to join the Upside Pizza Club and get access to these concerts. And a free slice every day for the next year too.

You can join here for $199.

Back in 2014, USV got subpoenaed by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) over our web3 investing activities. We hired a law firm, answered the subpoena, and that ultimately landed me in public testimony in front of the DFS staff.

In my testimony, I explained to the DFS staff that the difference between the US and China is that the US respects the freedom to innovate:

I was reminded of that moment yesterday when, in our quarterly call with our Limited Partners at USV, we were asked if the regulatory pressure on web3 in the US would result in us cutting back our web3 investing.

To which I responded:

When they want to shut it down, I say double down

The most powerful technologies send waves of fear through the establishment.

When you see that fear in their eyes, invest in the cause of that fear.

The last time I posted was May 23rd, three weeks ago.

There was a time when I wrote every day. When I had not yet posted on any day, I felt like something was missing, like I had not yet had my cup of coffee.

Clearly, I have moved on from that need to write every day.

I don’t think I have ever gone three weeks without posting in the almost twenty years I’ve been writing this blog. The 20th anniversary of AVC will be on September 23rd of this year.

So why did I go three weeks without posting?

First and foremost, I did not feel like writing.

There are reasons for that.

The last week of May was completely nuts with a ton of stuff coming at me, some planned like a move out of our family office, some expected like a family medical situation, and some completely unexpected. That week was nuts.

And then on the evening of May 31st, the Gotham Gal and I got on an overnight flight to Paris and took a long-planned two-week vacation in a city we’ve been going to for decades to rest, relax, reconnect, and enjoy Paris and each other.

I’ve always tended to write on vacation but on this vacation, I read.

I may write about what I read this vacation. Or maybe I won’t. But it was not about business, tech, or anything that I tend to write about here. I wanted to get out of that zone and take on some new territory. And I am glad I did.

I worked a bit on vacation. I always do. The VC business is about supporting people, teams, and companies. You can’t really take a vacation from that.

But you can cut back a lot on that and I did.

I also slept a lot. In Eruope, if you try to stay on NYC time, you can go to bed late at night and get up when it is almost noon. There is something decadent about that. Like going back to high school and college when there wasn’t always something waiting for you when you woke up. I also took a lot of naps.

We also walked a lot, rode bikes around town, and spent time wandering around a city we know well and love to explore.

It was a great break, one I needed, and I am mostly happy to be heading home. I am writing this on the flight back.

I don’t know if I will jump right back into writing once or twice a week but I hope so.

I like writing. It brings things out of me that I did not know I had. I don’t know any other way to get those things out of my brain and out into the open.

So hopefully you will see some new stuff from me next week. What it will be I have no clue. But I have never planned out my writing. I like to let it flow out of me in the moment.

In closing, I’d like to address this tweet from Liad, a longtime AVC reader:

I understand that a daily dose of anything is a great thing. I love my daily flat white (cortado in the summer).

But these are not dark times we are in. And I am not writing less because of a lack of excitement for the times we are in.

The combination of computer science advances in machine learning, decentralized systems (blockchains), and new forms of interacting with compute (chat interfaces, heads up displays, voice, etc) presents the most potent cocktail of innovation I have ever seen. We are also seeing amazing scientific advances in areas like renewable/clean energy, health and wellness (biotech), robotics, and many other areas.

These are bright times. As bright as they come.

I will try to write more often and shine a bright light on these things.

Smartphones have had voice input for over a decade now and yet I don’t know that many people who use voice input regularly.

I would guess that maybe 10 to 20% of smartphone users are using voice input regularly. That’s a guess based on absolutely no data other than observing friends, family, and colleagues.

However, in the last week I have started to use voice input a lot more as a result of a friend encouraging me to do it.

Also in the last week, I’ve suggested to my mom that she start using voice input on her phone and I recommended that the Gotham Gal start using voice input to text and email.

So why now?

I don’t think it is because voice input has gotten appreciably better in the last couple of years. I think it is because typing on a phone is annoying and I want to do it less.

What I have observed in the last week using voice input is that the speech-to-text recognition is almost perfect.

But I have yet to figure out how to format things the way I like with voice. For example, I don’t really know how to create new paragraphs or punctuation. I don’t know how to embed links or attach files or photos.

I like to write in a list format. I don’t know how to do that with voice.

So I have a lot to learn about speaking to my phone instead of typing on it. But I think voice input is going to stick for me because I can feel the habit starting to form.

I’m excited to start engaging with my phone in a completely different way and learning new tricks.

And I expect I’ll probably write more blog posts this way.

I wrote this one entirely by speaking to my phone.

The term “censorship resistant” is used a lot in the decentralized computing/web3/crypto space to talk about a core feature of these systems. I don’t love the term censorship resistant because it is a wonky term.

Software that is encoded in smart contracts (and other ways) on fully decentralized blockchains can’t be shut down or turned off.

So why is this a big deal?

Let’s make up a story:

Imagine that an AI is trained to teach children to read better than humans. But the powers that be decide that teaching children to read is something that humans need to do. So they make this AI illegal and block access to it.

Well if this AI is written in a smart contract on a fully decentralized blockchain, it can’t be shut down. As long as there are nodes somewhere around the world willing to maintain the blockchain, this AI will continue to run and anyone that has access to the Internet will be able to use it.

That’s a made-up story, but hopefully, you get the point. I picked AIs and education, but you could also go with self custody and your money. Or you could go with image detection and speeding cameras.

The point is that the powers that be have, from time to time, decided that certain things are bad and attempted to shut them down. Alcohol, for example. Or sex between two people who love each other, for example. Or books about racism, for example.

Fully decentralized blockchains offer something powerful. Software that can’t be turned off. Data that is open to everyone. AIs that can’t be shut down.

We are in a moment with enormous posibilities brought on by the computer science revolutions in machine learning, decentralized systems, and new user interfaces. It will be tempting for powerful entrenched interests to seek to put the genie back in the bottle on some of this stuff. But if the genie is deployed on a fully decentralized blockchain, there is no going back in the bottle.

EV sales in the US are on the rise, reaching 7% of all car sales in Q1 2023, up from 4.6% a year earlier. If that rate of growth continues, EVs will be 10% of the US car market by next year.

Most people who own an EV charge it at home, using an EV charger. Our family owns a few different models. Here are two of them.

The reason we have two chargers right next to each other is one charges our Tesla and the other charges our other EVs. It is like an iPhone and an Android. Each has its own charging cable. I expect that is going to get sorted out soon as the EV market will work a lot better with a standard charging cable.

But what is even more interesting to me is the idea of bi-directional EV charging.

Right now, EV charging is “one way”. Those chargers take power from our home (either from our solar panels or the grid) and send it to our EVs.

But it does not have to work that way. There are bi-directional chargers that can take the power from our EVs and send it to our home.

That would be very useful in the event of a power outage. But it could also be useful to supplement our solar panels at night. Imagine our solar panels filling up our EV batteries during the day when it is sunny out and our EVs powering our home at night when it is not.

This is a nice primer on the topic of bi-directional EV charging. I like this diagram from that primer.

That is the simplest version of bi-directional EV charging. That primer has a bunch more diagrams of more sophisticated versions.

As we transition from a centralized electrical grid to a decentralized electrical grid over the next few decades, storage on the edge (homes, etc) will become critical to making the transition work. And EVs are a huge source of storage that are mostly not connected to the grid right now.

That is going to change and there are lots of opportunities to build innovative services around bi-directional charging as a result.

The Gotham Gal and I make environmentally designed apartment buildings and the one we are making right now has eight parking spots in the basement. We will outfit those parking spots with bi-directional chargers so that the cars in the garage will be connected to the apartments and they can power them in the event of a power outage. We expect to be able to offer additional services to our tenants over time using this technology.

The forty years that I have worked in information technology have seen a remarkable decentralization of computing from mainframes to computers in our pockets. And that has unleashed an enormous wave of innovation. I expect we will see the same thing in the energy grid/market over the next forty years. I am really excited to witness that.

Like tens of millions of others, I downloaded Threads onto my phone yesterday and signed up.

The thing that Twitter has been missing since it killed off its ecosystem over a decade ago is competition. And as we all know, lack of competition is a very bad thing. In governments and in products.

Competition keeps you honest. Competition makes you hustle. Competition forces you to innovate. Competition makes you better.

So I am thrilled to see some real competition emerge for Twitter.

I am also excited to see a scaled social media platform embrace an open protocol. In the case of Threads, that protocol is Activity Pub.

As far as I can tell, Threads does not yet support ActivityPub but has committed to doing so.

I have not enjoyed using any social media apps built on the ActivityPub protocol, most notably Mastodon, but I am not sure if that is the fault of the protocol or Mastodon’s implementation. Hopefully, we will see a better implementation with Threads.

But more importantly, protocols that are widely used bring lots of developers to them and those developers bring lots of different ideas and products.

So to me, Threads is about two really important things:

1/ Competition for Twitter. Long overdue and badly needed.

2/ The emergence of a widely supported social media protocol. Which should produce a vibrant and interoperable social media ecosystem.

I’ve got some questions in my mind about how all of this will work.

What will identity look like in this “vibrant and interoperable social media ecosystem?” It can’t be and hopefully won’t be my Instagram handle. Ideally, it would look something like ENS where each and every one of us will own and control our own identity/handle, like we can own and control a domain name.

Will there be one protocol for all of social media (short form text, long form text, audio, video, etc)? Will Instagram support ActivityPub too, for example?

What role will web3 play in all of this or will web3 social emerge on a different dimension entirely?

The ability to even ask those questions and ponder the answers is a gift to me and to the world. And so, therefore, is Threads.

I spent a good part of my childhood at West Point, the US Military Academy. I got an email yesterday with photos of the flooding at West Point.

My dad and brother used to work in that grey stone building called Mahan Hall.

And the same storms that did this to West Point did worse to many parts of New England, particularly Vermont.

USV’s climate thesis is to invest in companies and projects that provide mitigation for or adaptation to the climate crisis. Adaptation means accepting that we’ve made the climate worse and adapting to it.

Flooding is a great example of that. As the earth warms, storms are capable of carrying a lot more water and dumping it quickly. West Point took ten inches of rain in a few hours.

USV has made investments in two companies working on flood adaptation; Floodmapp and an unannounced investment in a company helping communities become flood resilient. Flooding will be more common and we are going to need better tools to mitigate and manage it.

Along those lines, NYC’s Partnership Fund recently announced a new accelerator program focused on water. Their partner on this accelerator is the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) which manages NYC’s water and wastewater treatment operations.

This accelerator is called the Environmental Tech Lab and they are looking for early and growth-stage companies that have products that could be used by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection.

If you are building such a company and want to apply, you can do that here.

Flood and water management will be critical in adapting to the climate crisis and, unfortunately, is going to be a big business.

The venture capital sector has been in a sustained downturn for almost eighteen months. How does this downturn end? Well, it may have already ended, but let’s see about that. We will know for sure in a few quarters.

The NASDAQ peaked at roughly 16,000 in November 2021. By June 2022, it was down 33%. It stayed down for all of 2022 and ended the year at roughly 10,500.

But this year the NASDAQ is up almost 40%.

What is driving this? If I had to pick one thing, I would say inflation and interest rates. Yeah, those are two things but they are tied together in times like this. As I laid out in the prior versions of How This Ends (here and here), I believe post-pandemic inflation forced the Fed to raise rates aggressively, blowing a huge hole in the asset bubble that built up during the pandemic.

Last week we got some great news. Inflation is way down in the US. That means rates may have peaked and will stabilize or possibly come down. I don’t know if the Fed makes any more moves or not. But I am not sure that really matters. What matters most to markets is expectations and I think inflation and interest rate expectations have settled down.

Private capital markets, like venture capital, lag public markets by a few quarters. That is because it takes time for private market investors to react to the public markets. The NASDAQ peaked in Nov 2021, but VC markets did not really start slowing down until the second quarter of 2022.

Now that the NASDAQ has posted a couple of strong quarters, I would expect venture capital to respond. But it won’t happen overnight. We are in the summer doldrums. It takes time for VCs to raise new funds. And deals take months to come together.

So my guess is we are mostly through this downturn. We will know for sure in a couple of quarters.

The New York Times had a piece yesterday suggesting that tech will no longer be a growth engine for NYC and the surrounding metro area as it has been for the last twenty years. I am not going to link to the piece because it is behind a paywall but if you want to read it, you can google “Tech Firms Once Powered New York’s Economy. Now They’re Scaling Back.” I talked to one of the reporters who worked on the piece and told him that their angle was incorrect. But when a publication has their mind made up on the angle, there isn’t much you can do to convince them otherwise.

If you take a real estate angle, which is how the New York Times approached the story, it is true that technology companies, large and small, are cutting back on their space needs. But that is more a reflection of the era of remote/hybrid workforces than anything else.

Here is what I told the reporter working on the story:

1/ Office leases to tech companies are down. The tech sector has embraced remote and hybrid workforces and their office space needs reflect that.

2/ Rank and file tech workers in NYC are roughly flat as many workers have left the NYC metro area but just as many have come here from other locations.

3/ Top talent in tech has massively increased in NYC since the pandemic as people with in-demand skills can now work anywhere and don’t have to be in the Bay Area anymore. There are significantly more USV portfolio company leaders in NYC today than there were before the pandemic.

I saw a headline the other day that said that more than half of the top 50 AI companies are in the Bay Area and another 10% are in NYC and nowhere else has a significant number of them. So in many ways, not much has changed with respect to the centers of gravity of the technology sectors.

Technology is the growth sector of this century and new sectors like AI, renewable energy, web3, etc will power the economies of many regions around the world. NYC will be a significant beneficiary of this, as it has been for the last twenty years.

The idea that the tech sector will not be a growth engine for NYC anymore is laughable. But that won’t stop people from suggesting otherwise.

I’ve written about this topic a bunch over the years. It is something I’ve been interested in for quite a while.

Our homes are filled with big hunks of plastic hanging on the wall that are off most of the time. They look like this:

Now that’s a lovely scene. Some nice plants. A cool wood cabinet. A nice lamp. A few books. And a piece of black plastic.

Here’s what our family room looks like when we are not watching the TV:

That’s a Sony TV with nothing special in it. I have done some work to make the art run on it, but that work is getting easier and easier. I’ve been playing around with this stuff for almost a decade and I feel like we are about to get to a place where everyone can do this.

Here’s what is involved.

1/ It is now simple to collect digital art that you can show on your TV. Here is the NFT that is showing on that photo. I minted it five days ago for about $90. It is part of a series of NFTs, but mine is unique. There is not another one that looks exactly like this one. There are hundreds of places you can mint NFTs these days and new NFT mints are offered every day, possibly every hour.

2/ It is relatively easy to write software to show NFTs on a TV. My partner Nick did that for the TVs at USV last year. We run that software on an inexpensive device called a Yodeck. I am currently using software written by the Bright Moments DAO for their NFT events and that runs on a Mac Mini.

3/ I expect a number of companies and projects will write consumer-grade software to do this over the next few years and I also expect the big consumer electronics companies to start shipping smart TVs with this kind of software in them.

Here is how I see this market working.

1/ You buy a smart TV with an NFT app in it.

2/ You connect it to the address that holds your NFTs. For me that is fredwilson.eth. You can see my collection here.

3/ You create playlists like you create playlists on your favorite music app.

4/ You tell the TV to play those playlists when the TV is off.

All of the pieces are in place for this to happen. We just need the software to be written and the consumer electronics companies to adopt it. That feels inevitable to me.

USV has been an investor in the Helium network since 2019. I have always loved the idea of using web3 technologies to let consumers to “peer produce” a communications network creating a people-powered network.

Helium started out powering communications between low-power “Internet of Things (IOT)” devices but with the introduction of Helium Mobile back in May, they are now powering a cell phone network.

My friend Stephen started using Helium Mobile last month and so I decided to join him. I signed up for Helium Mobile yesterday ($25/month but free during the beta period) and added it as a second SIM on my phone.

Now on the upper right of my home screen, I have two cell networks instead of one:

For now, I am going to use Helium Mobile alongside my primary carrier, T-Mobile, but I do plan to eventually scrap T-Mobile and use Helium Mobile exclusively.

Helium Mobile offers members the opportunity to earn Mobile tokens by sharing your location with the network. They call this “mapping”. I turned that on yesterday and should start seeing Mobile tokens in my Helium Mobile app today.

If you want to join me as a Helium Mobile customer, you can do that here.

I got a new Pixel 7 last week and have started the tedious process of moving over to a new phone.

One of the more painful chores in moving from one phone to another is moving the Google Authenticator app and all of the two factor codes to the new phone.

My partner Nick told me about Yubikey Authenticator and I converted to it while moving phones since I was going to have to get all new codes anyway.

If you use a Yubikey for anything else, switching to Yubikey Authenticator is a breeze.

You download the Yubikey Authenticator app onto your phone, insert your Yubikey and start scanning QR codes (just like Google Authenticator).

Then any time you need a code, you simply insert your Yubikey into your phone and your codes appear in the app.

You can also put the Yubikey Authenticator app on a laptop or a desktop and get the codes that way which is a great backup solution in case you misplace or lose your phone.

And, when it is time to switch phones, you simply put the Yubikey Authenticator app on your new phone and insert the Yubikey and your codes are there.

Even with all of this goodness, I still keep physical copies of my backup codes in a safe. I am also considering setting up a second Yubikey for the two factor codes I use the most just in case I lose my main one.

When it comes to two factor codes, I think you have to have a plan B and a plan C.

If you use a Yubikey already, consider using the Yubikey Authenticator for your two factor codes.

For many years, there were three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ X – Follow AVC on X

X revoked the API access that I was using to autopost three or four months ago. I have not been active on that service for almost a year now and have no interest in dealing with it.

So if you are one of the 25.5k followers on X and want to keep getting alerted when I post, I suggest you go with option 1 or option 2 going forward. There is also a new third option that I will talk about at the end of this post.

If you subscribe to AVC via RSS, you are likely using the old Feedburner feed. That has become unreliable and I would suggest moving to the Feedblitz feed which also powers the AVC email delivery.

I finally moved the email delivery off the old Feedburner feed this week when last week’s post did not go out via email. I suspect most of you missed it as a result.

All of this is a perfect example of the fragility of relying on centralized services like X and Feedburner (owned by Google). USV was an early investor in both services and I was a big user of them.

But all things come to an end in the world of centralized services and the challenges of getting AVC delivered to the ~100,000 subscribers reminded me of that last week.

There is a world where services just keep running because they are open source and decentralized. I wrote about that back in June and I am excited about that world to emerge.

AVC is available in the decentralized world and you can subscribe there if you’d like.

So now there are three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ Web3 – Subscribe to AVC on Mirror

If you are using the email delivery method, you are all good. If you are using the old RSS feed or X, I would suggest moving to something else. Or you could just stop getting AVC if that suits you. Many of you already have thanks to X and Google (and me).