Writing

Regular AVC readers may have noticed that after blogging about my once a day routine , I posted twice yesterday. What happened is that I had been planning on blogging about Summer Bridge , a project we’ve been working on [...]  Read more

NYC’s Summer Youth Employment Program is the nation’s largest youth employment program, historically connecting NYC’s neediest young adults (between the ages of 14 and 24) with a paid work experience every summer. The COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into it [...]  Read more

My friend Jonathan sent me a couple graphs he made of the content on AVC over the years. Here is how word count has evolved over the years. I started out with short posts, got longer for a while, and [...]  Read more

My partner Nick blogged about this Kickstarter project yesterday and I immediately backed it. Second Chance Studio is a nonprofit digital media company that trains and employs formerly incarcerated individuals. You can back their Kickstarter project here . USV TEAM [...]  Read more

I am a fan of the slow and steady approach to building a business. I call it “crawl, walk, run.” I have seen many founders try the “run right away” approach and it is super hard to make that work. [...]  Read more

In my book World After Capital , I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the [...]  Read more

Several years ago, I started volunteering at Defy Ventures , a program that helps formerly incarcerated individuals start their own businesses. Through Defy, I met an entrepreneur named Coss Marte , who beginning to build a personal fitness business called [...]  Read more

I’m sitting outside of my favorite coffee shop sipping on a coffee and writing. I do this many mornings. When I walked into the coffee shop this morning I was wearing a mask: I counted all of the people in [...]  Read more

One of my favorite ideas from the last 10 years is “The Slow Hunch” which my friend Steven Johnson popularized in his book Where Good Ideas Come From . Here is a good summary of the book , and the [...]  Read more