I am writing about one of the best patent hacks I have seen in the decade that I have been working to find relief from the ridiculous patent system in our country.

Twitter came up with a concept last year called the Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA) and put a draft IPA up on GitHub. They have gotten a ton of feedback and have iterated and improved the concept since then.

The basic idea of the IPA is that it is a contract between Twitter and the engineer(s) and designer(s) who developed the IP. The contract says that Twitter will not use the patent offensively nor will anyone who acquires the patent from Twitter. It goes on to say that Twitter or a subsquent owner could use the patent offensively with the engineers' and/or designers' approval.

Twitter announced yesterday that it had entered into an agreement with Loren Brichter, the author of the pull to refresh patent that will subject that patent to an IPA. They also announced that they will subject all of their patents to the IPA. They went on to say that Jelly, Lift, StackExchange, and Tell Apart have agreed to adopt the IPA for all of their patents.

USV has been talking to our portfolio companies about the IPA since Twitter posted it last year. They all know we are big fans of it and we hope they will choose to adopt it for all of their patents. We will not do more than that however. Our portfolio companies are independent of USV and can make up their own minds about their IP strategies.

That said, I would expect to see other USV portfolio companies join StackExchange on this IPA parade.

Twitter is an amazing company and I am very proud to be associated with it. The fact that they would take this extraordinary step and then show leadership in the industry to get others to join them is a testament to that. It's a proud day for Twitter and for me.

I've written and spoken a fair bit about native advertising so regular readers will likely be quite familiar with this topic. However, from what I am seeing out there, native advertising is really hitting its stride as social platforms and mobile consumption become the norm. If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur working in the advertising/marketing space, you should be paying attention to this trend.

I will be kicking off the event at 1pm with a brief talk and some Q&A.

If you want to go, here is a link to get a 50% discount on the event for readers of AVC.

This is Internet Week in NYC and I am making a number of public appearances in addition to this native advertising summit. Here's the whole shebang:

Last night - introducing the Gotham Gal at the MOUSE 15 Annivesary Event

This morning - Opening the CMSummit with John Battelle at 9:10am

Wednesday evening - March For Innovation (immigration) event at AppNexus with Brian O'Kelly

Thursday mid-day - The Native Advertising event

Thursday at 4:30pm - OpenCo Festival event with John Battelle and Dave Morgan at Simulmedia

It's a busy week but with a Vespa scooter and a mind full of things to say, it shouldn't be too hard. I hope to see you all around town this week.

One of the cliches I posted about is "success has a thousand fathers." I thought I would re-run that post. Here it is.

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You can count on it - when a deal works out spectacularly everyone involved will take credit for it.

This behavior is particularly annoying to the entrepreneurs who put the sweat, blood, and tears into the Company.

They watch the VCs take credit for the big success and it grates on them.

I have a couple rules that I try very hard to live by in this regard:
1- the management team always gets the credit.  VCs don't do the dirty work and should not get the accolades when things work out.
2 - don't gloat.  it's not becoming.  humility in times of great success is a very becoming characteristic.

But it's really hard to follow these rules when things work out well.  Because success doesn't come that often, and when it does, it has a thousand fathers.

Back in 2004, early in my blogging career, I heard about a service that had just launched called Feedburner. It provided a number of useful services for a blog's RSS feed. So I went and signed up and AVC became one of the first users of the service. I immediately liked the service and the idea. So I contacted the founder/CEO Dick Costolo, who has gone onto bigger and better things. I told Dick that I was interested in making an investment in Feedburner. My friend Brad Feld was also talking to Dick about the same thing so we decided to do the investment together.

As part of our investment process, we do a bunch of fact gathering/checking work that is called Due Diligence in the vernacular of the VC business. So my partner Brad Burnham and I put together a list of leading blogs and online publishers who had popular RSS feeds at the time. I think there were a dozen or so publications on that list. It included Weblogs (Engadget), Gawker (Gawker), NY Times, and a bunch more. We know most everyone who ran those operations so we called them.

What we heard was surprising. Not one of them was willing to hand over their RSS feed to a third party for analytics and monetization. We were very surprised to hear that and thought a bit about it. But, we decided, we could not invest in something that the big publishers would not support. So regrettably, I called Dick and told him we had to pass and why. Brad Feld went ahead with the investment and Feedburner closed their round without USV.

About six months later I ran into Dick at an industry conference. We decided to grab lunch together and during lunch he said to me "you know those dozen publishers you called?" I said "yes, what about them?" He said "every single one of them is on Feedburner now."

I was pissed. How could that be? So I said to Dick, "Would you consider letting us into that last round we walked away from." He said "No, but I will let you invest at a 50% increase in price". We did that and became an investor in Feedburner. And that worked out well when Feedburner was sold to Google a few years later.

So what did I learn from this lesson? First, trust your gut. I was using Feedburner and knew it was a very useful service. I felt that others would see that too. They did, but it took some time. Second, I learned that a service can get traction with the little guys and in time, the big guys will come along. I have seen that happen quite a bit since then. And finally, I learned that you can do too much due diligence. It's important to talk to the market and hear what it is saying. But you have to balance that with other things; the quality of the team, the product, the user experience, etc. You cannot rely alone on due diligence, particularly early on in the development of a company and a market.

This hiatus, which I've blogged about a bit on and off, was mostly a result of being very full up with responsibilities for existing investments. I have made twenty investments since the founding of USV in the fall of 2004 (now 21) and have only exited six, so I have had fourteen investments that I am responsible for at USV. I take our responsibility to our portfolio companies higher than any other work related responsbility and these fourteen companies have required a lot of time and attention over the past two years.

Two things have happened to get me off the schneid (a hitless streak if you aren't familiar with that term). First, the fourteeen companies have all matured a lot in the past two years and the demands of that group of companies has waned a bit. And second, I have come to believe that a number of new fundamental technologies have hit the Internet and it is time to get busy putting out money.

One of these is Bitcoin. Here is a snippet of what I wrote today on the USV blog:

We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful, an open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS, and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness. Like what happened with those other low level protocols, entrepreneurs and developers are now building technology on top of Bitcoin to make it more useful, more accessible, and more secure.

It is possible that we may make more Bitcoin/digital currency investments but we will try to make sure they are not competitive with Coinbase. And there are other sectors out there that are emerging now that I am keeping my eye on as well. I hope to be more active in making new investments in the coming months. It's good to be back at it.

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I woke up thinking about that in the context of Kickstarter today. It must be related to the fact that today is the fourth anniversary of Kickstarter's launch. How was it that I was so sure the Kickstarter project would work when it launched back in 2009? Well it was because of what happened on this blog a couple years before that.

The story starts in the fall of 2007. Charles Best, the founder of DonorsChoose emailed me and asked if I would enter AVC into the DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge. He wanted this community to compete with other tech blogs to see who could raise the most money for teachers and their classrooms. I said yes and we entered, and won, the tech category in 2007. We entered again in 2008 and won again. In the final year of the social media challenge (renamed to encompass more than bloggers) we won the tech category again. This post, which I wrote in November 2009, after our threepeat, shows that the AVC community raised almost $60,000 for teachers and their classrooms in those three October showdowns.

So when Perry Chen came by to talk about Kickstarter in the summer of 2009, my mind was prepared to understand what he and his co-founders were up to. When he explained that artists and other project creators were going to post their projects and get them funded on the Internet, I thought "of course" instead of "that will never work."

And I have Charles and the DonorsChoose team and the AVC community to thank for that. Which I book in the category of "what goes around, comes around".

And I cannot resist reminding everyone that we have a DonorsChoose campaign running on AVC right now, called Good Things Come To Those Who Code. If you have not made a contribution and want to, now is the time. The campaign ends at midnight on Tuesday. Go here if you want to participate.

If you want to skip the unboxing and information and go right to the flying part, that starts about 5:40 in.

I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years. We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can't make money by being wrong. And you can't make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. I really like that framework.

The same logic applies to starting companies. If you start a company in a market everyone knows is going to be big, then you will have a ton of competition. If, however, you start a company in a market everyone is laughing at, you won't have too many competitors.

This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers.

Chris Dixon has a great post about hobbyists. He likes to look at what the next homebrew computer club type activities are these days. When I saw Chris yesterday he was talking about drones and asteroids. I laughed. He grinned ear to ear. Chris knows that it's good to be ridiculed.

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster. Momentum investing works in highly liquid markets (sometimes). From what I can tell, it almost never works in private markets.

Better to invest in laughing stocks. Becuase she who laugh lasts, laughs best.

Well the taping is today at the Reuters building in Times Square from 5pm to 6pm and the first 25 people to sign up can attend. The link to RSVP is here. Please don't RSVP unless you really plan to attend.

We are going to talk about immigration, regulation 2.0, bitcoin, and a few other things that will be common themes to the AVC community.

It's a long video, almost an hour, but we cover a lot of topics near and dear to this community. So give it a watch this weekend if you can find the time.

Christina makes this point about medallions and monopolists:

I’ve started to believe the leverage in the “sharing economy” will be in opening regulated industries. SF cabs were atrocious because there are too few medallions. (Turns out the medallion holders, keen to restrict medallion supply, were well-incented lobbyists, as any good monopolist should be.) The revolutionary part of Lyft and Sidecar is that those companies decided, forget the medallion battles! and let’s just increase the number of drivers on the road.

I love this Margaret Mead quote:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

So now, after quoting two bright women, I will get to my point.

Monopolies aren't great for society. So we have trust busters in government whose job it is to keep the monopolies in check. But they don't do that so well. And our government is pretty good at handing monopolies out. Just look at the cable industry.

A few entrepreneurs in a garage. Or a few hackers on the Internet. They are the best trust busters of them all. Look what open source Linux did to Microsoft. They put a dent in a machine that the government could not. And look at what Lyft, Sidecar, and Uber did to the medallion owners in San Franscisco. They got cabs on the streets when the government could not.

Never doubt that a small startup can take on a huge monopoly. Indeed, it is the only thing that can.

#ifihadglass I would wear them on the subway too

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 20, 2013

I wasn't joking, although it was a reference to Sergey's subway ride. I will wear my glasses on the subway when I get them. If you want to invest in the services that are going to be built for these devices, then you need to own these devices.

Fortunately I know a few winners and I will get my hands on Glass early on. But if anyone at Google is reading this, I'd love to buy a pair of my own.

So what happens with the other two-thirds? Well that is the part of the startup world that we don't talk too much about. Sometimes an entrepreneur will take an early exit. They will have raised a small amount of outside money, will still control the company, and will get an offer they can't refuse, and take it. That's a win for the entrepreneur but not for the VC. But it is a happy outcome for everyone anyway. That's maybe 10% of the total outcomes. So at least 50% of the outcomes are not a win for the VC or the entrepreneur.

So what happens when things don't work out? There are generally two scenarios.

The first is the "slog it out" scenario. This one is in many ways the most painful. It means that there is a business that can be built, but it won't be one that makes the VCs much money and because it takes so much time and money to "slog it out", it doesn't make the entrepreneur much money either. And in many cases, the entrepreneur chooses to leave and the company has to recruit outside management to operate the business.

In the "slog it out" sceanrio, the VCs are often left holding the bag. They have a lot invested in the business and have a responsibility to figure out how to get it out. In some cases, the entrepreneur sticks around and slogs it out along with the VCs. I have great admiration for the entrepreneurs I have worked with who have slogged it out. There is very little upside for them in this scenario. Mostly they do it out of a sense of responsibility. These "slog it out" businesses can go on for a long time. I am involved with some that are well into their second decade and I am afraid that they may be headed into a third decade. I have heard these kinds of companies called "zombie companies and "the living dead". That's a bit unfair because there is no way a company can operate for two or three decades without being able to sustain itself. VCs do not keep pouring money into these businesses, maybe they do that for the first five years, but not after that. These "slog it out" companies turn into real companies eventually but just not companies that have the growth trajectories or strategic profiles that make them great acquisitions.

The second scenario is "hit the wall". In this scenario, the company runs out of cash and there is no more coming from the investors. The company cannot sustain itself and one of two things happens. There is a fire sale or an acqui-hire, or there is a shut down. The fire sale is the preferred outcome and VCs and entrepreneurs have gotten pretty good at finding homes for the teams in recent years. There is such a vacuum of talent out there that a fire sale can often be arranged just for the talent that a company has assembled. But often the fire sale cannot be arranged and the company has to be shut down. Again, the responsibility for an orderly shut down often falls onto the VCs to manage. In a shut down, the employees must be notified and paid through the date of the shut down. All required tax payments must be made. Liabilities such as leases and bank borrowings must be managed. In particularly messy situations, a bankruptcy filing is required.

There are two interesting things here that I always think about. The first is that even the very best investors in the VC business only get a hit about 1/3 of the time. That means that they have their share of "slog it outs" and "hit the walls" too. I am certainly in that camp. The second is that we end up spending an incredible amount of time and energy (hopefully not money) on the 2/3 of our investments that don't work out. When everything goes well, you really don't need that much from a VC. Of course, I have added value in all of my winners. But its the ones that don't work that I have left my blood, sweat, and tears on. And that's the paradox of being a VC that cares. Which is the only kind of VC you want to work with.

Each of us brings something different to the partnership and like a winning basketball team (we are also five), each person knows their role and delivers when it counts. Each partner has a hot hand for a while, then cools down, then gets hot again.

The hottest hand at USV in the past few years belongs to Albert who has been killing it. Many of you know him from his blog called Continuations. I finally got around to watching AVC community member Rohan's interview with Albert and it captures much of what makes Albert so great to work with. So I am making Rohan's interview the video of the week:

The blogging revolution in publishing is a great example of this. Once everyone could have a printing press, we got to see many important developments that did not and would not have happened as long as publishing was a high cost operation limited to professionals.

So what is the Tumblr or Blogger or Wordpress of data science? When will my son and his friends be able to take the NBA dataset and start running algorithms against it to produce better fantasy picks? When will my daugther and her friends be able to take the TV viewing dataset to decide what TV shows to go back and watch that they missed last year?

I believe data science is going to go mainstream in the coming years. What will be the platform(s) that make that happen?

I love Paul Bucheit's edict to "live in the future". I totally agree that is the best way to find the things that will turn out to be the next big thing. Being a hobbyist is a great way to live in the future. And so I try to play around with all of this stuff in order to wrap my mind around it. You should too.

Chris lays out some things that hobbyists are playing around with a lot these days:

Today, the tech hobbies with momentum include: math-based currencies like Bitcoin, new software development tools like NoSQL databases, the internet of things, 3D printing, touch-free human/computer interfaces, and “artisanal” hardware like the kind you find on Kickstarter.

I am very pleased to say that we have investments in most of those hobbies and are working to make more.

But I also think that they may be the hobbies of the moment or even possibly the hobbies of the past few years. What are the hobbies that we should take on next? That is what I woke up thinking about this morning.

The short answer is that Brad, who I founded USV with a decade ago, has felt from day one that policy and governance will be as important as technology in shaping what the market looks like in the coming years. And that, of course, will shape how impactful our portfolio companies are, and that will ultimately shape our returns. And we are in the returns business.

The longer answer has to do with the power of networks, which are central to our investment thesis, to be an economic force in society. These networks will reshape markets, lower costs, bring efficiencies, and disrupt the ways that things are done. And those who are incumbents in today's model will fight these networks tooth and nail, because they threaten their incumbency. And that will lead to policy fights. We want to get out ahead of all that as much as we can.

I have not seen much written about this coming change. So I was pleased to see a post by Om Malik yesterday that laid all of this out clearly and succinctly. Om says:

the challenges of the connected future are less technical and more legislative, political and philsophical. The shift from a generation that started out un-connected to one that is growing up connected will result in conflicts, disruption and eventually the redrawing of our societal expectations.

This redrawing of societal expectations is likely to be the political battle of our time. Om goes on to talk about this in the context of the labor issues that Uber is having in San Francisco. That is a good example of what happens when networks and the data they produce reshape a market that has been operating in a traditional framework.

We are at the start of this battle between incumbents, be they black car drivers or cable companies or government itself, and the network driven upstarts. And we have many of those upstarts in our portfolio. So our policy work is ultimately an investment in the success of our portfolio companies. And that is why we spend so much time on policy stuff.

I've been thinking about it more and more these days. We negotiate a sophisticated set of documents when we invest in a company and for the most part, those documents never come into play. Many times when things go badly, we rip up the documents and decide what to do based on an honest discussion among the interested parties. When things go well, all we need are the stock certificates.

I am not suggesting USV is going to start doing deals on a handshake. We have investors and we have a responsibility to them to act responsibly.

But if I were an angel, I might do things differently. There is something powerful that comes from establishing trust early in a relationship.

I always like to imagine the way that Andy Bechtolsheim handed Larry and Sergey that check for $100,000. I have no idea how it went down, but I always imagine they that pitched him, he said "sounds great" and whipped out his check book and wrote a check for $100,000. I sure hope that is how it happened. If instead he said "I will get my lawyers to draft a purchase agreement" I will be really bummed out.

The biggest problem with doing business on a handshake is you may not be dealing with the same folks in a few years. And when the person you are dealing with changes, things change. In those situations, you have to have a written agreement to fall back on. And it will be too late to get that document in place when the circumstances change.

So the right thing to do is get it in writing before you part with your cash. That is how I have always done it and how I suspect I will always do it.

But the most important thing in business is the understanding, the look in the eye, the handshake, and the personal trust that comes from those things. No piece of paper can beat that.

I would go even further. I would assert that rooting, jailbreaking, and other actions that users take to gain total control of their device should be entirely legal in this country.

Here is why. We need to defend the concept of general purpose computing. General purpose computing is the idea that the owner of the computer can get access to the base computing functions on the device. Rewind to the time of the homebrew computer club. Hackers and coders were building their own computing devices and putting software on them and making what became personal computers. Personal computers have evolved a lot since then, most recently ending up in our pockets and purses, but they remain personal to the core.

In recent years we have seen more and more attempts to separate us from the core computing functions on our personal computing devices. The iPhone is stock full of them and that is the fundamental reason I will never use one. The same is true of the iPad. So iOS users jailbreak their phones. The evasion iPhone jailbreak is on 23 million phones now.

Android phones and tablets are better, but the carriers who sell these Android devices play Apple's game pretty well themselves. Getting a Nexus with a clean build of Android what I do. Others cleanse their phones with Cyanogen or other mods.  All of this activity shows that many of us want to control our devices, configure them the way we want, and put the software on them that we want to put on them.

It feels to me and other industry observers I talk to that we are moving away from this notion of general purpose computing to some other place where we use devices that are controlled by others and that we can't truly make our own. This is a dangerous trend in the technology world and one we need to resist.

I feel a growing divide between the users, who are rooting, unlocking, and jailbreaking in record numbers, and the device makers and marketers who are tightening up the screws on their devices ever tighter. I stand with the users in this fight and unlock, root, and jailbreak as much as I can. You should too. And our governement should make this activity legal so that we do not face any adverse consequences from this behavior.

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I love interviewing entrepreneurs I've had the opportunity to work with. Last year, I interviewed Dennis Crowley at the first NYU Entrepreneurs Festival and I think it was great. I hope to do as well with Jack today.

And you all can help me. Please tweet out the questions you'd like me to ask Jack. Please include two hashtags in your tweet, #askjack and the festival hashtag #nyuef.

Thanks for your help and I hope we see you on the hashtag and on the livestream at 5:30pm eastern today.

Here are short term and long term returns for the venture capital business over the past ten years compared to the public equity markets in the US.

These numbers don't include the internet bubble of the late 90s, so they are just for the past ten years.

What jumps out at me is there are no venture capital returns in this set of numbers that break double digits. When I got into the business in the mid 80s, I was schooled that you needed to produce at least 20% annual returns net to the limited partners to stay in business.

The ten year comparisons to the public markets are also challenging. The NASDAQ Composite beats later and expansion stage funds and all the public indexes beat early and multi-stage funds.

The performance of early stage funds is particularly disappointing. You would expect early stage funds to underperform in the early years. But ten years out, you would expect to see early stage outperform multi and late stage. More risk should produce more return.

This is Cambridge Associates data so it is based on many of the leading venture capital firms and it spans tech, biotech, cleantech and other areas. I believe this is a good representation of the overall performance of the VC business in the US.

Early stage investing is hard. You lose more than you win. And when you win, you need to win big. Later stage investing is a bit easier. You can pick winners in that business more easily. But so can everyone else. Each deal is an auction and the winner pays the highest price.

So the next time you are bidding one VC against another, maybe you can feel just a bit of empathy for us. We are in a tough business, trying to make a buck to live to fight another day. Just like everyone else.

Daring Fireball says:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

"Designed" being the important word in that quote. Because we aren't done designing user interfaces. I think we are just getting started.

This piece in Wired got my head nodding because I am experiencing it every day on my Android phone. I find myself typing less and less on Android because the voice recognition is so damn good. And the type ahead prompts are like reading my mind. Instead of typing, I find myself selecting the next word more often than not.

Machine learning is the key innovation here. And in that area Google is so far ahead of every big company (and most small companies) that it is hard to imagine how they are not going to out innovate on the emerging user interfaces of our mobile future (glasses, watches, etc, etc).

The main topics were building a tech community outside of the main startup hubs, raising angel and venture capital in a market where there isn't much of that, and the differences between US and european investors.

When I watched this video this morning, the audio and video were out of sync which made it hard for me to watch. I ended up listening more than watching. I hope you all don't have that same problem.

 And maybe most importantly, we believe in large networks of users that have the power to transform big markets. We've long thought that the ubiquity of the smartphone will enable transactional networks between buyers and sellers and it turns out the urban transportation market is one of the first big markets that is rapidly being transformed by large smartphone networks. We are excited to be able to invest in one of them.

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We've done this format before, usually in our event space, and its a lot of fun to do a public appearance with all of my partners. We finish each other's sentences, tee up topics for each other, and tell stories together.

It is from 4pm to 6pm on February 14th at The Leonardo. The event is free but space is limited. RSVP here.

For much of last year Christina debated what she was going to do at the end of her stint. We made it even harder on her because we flirted with extending her stay. But at the end of year, she packed up her desk and headed out.

And today she explains all of that and what she's been doing since on her blog. I particularly like this part:

Why did I want to do something different? In part, because I wanted something that felt more tangible. But mostly because the story of the internet continues to be the story of our time. I’m pretty sure that if you truly want to follow — or, better still, bend — that story’s arc, you should know how to write code.

I admire Christina's willingness to leave a cushy job and take up the difficult task of teaching herself to code and building something publicly. I am sure it will turn out to have been a brilliant career move in time.

Marc Andreessen says you either will be the person who tells the computer what to do or the person that the computer tells what to do. I see more and more young folks internalizing that dichotomy and deciding to "get technical." And that makes me very happy, and I am particularly happy about and proud of the choice that Christina made.