Two years ago Steve and Jared spent a couple days hacking at the Disrupt Hackathon and ended up with GroupMe which went on to great success and an eventual sale to Skype.

For the past 24 hours, developers have been busy hacking away at Pier 94 trying to do the same. The demos will take place at Pier 94 from 11am until roughly 2pm, when the awards will be given out.

If you have a few hours free today and can resist the Party In Prospect Park or some other outdoor event on a beautiful spring day in NYC, you should head over to Pier 94 and check it out. Attendance is free but you do need to register on eventbrite.

This weekend finds NYC in between Internet Week (which I largely missed because of my London trip) and Disrupt NYC (which I will be at on and off this coming week). So the development of NYC as a startup hub is very much on my mind. And so I thought I'd post about the development of startup hubs.

This theory, which I like the call The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs, is not new and I certainly didn't come up with it. But I think it is important for everyone to understand and so I'm going to blog about it.

If you study Silicon Valley, what you see is something that looks like a forest where trees grow tall, produce seeds that drop and start new trees, and eventually the older trees mature and stop growing or worse, die of disease and rot, but the new trees grow up even taller and stronger.

In my mental model of Silicon Valley, the first "tree" was Fairchild Semiconductor (founded in 1957) which begat Intel (founded 1968) which begat Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977), which begat Sun (1982), Silicon Graphics (1981), and Cisco (1984) which begat Siebel (1993) and Netscape (1994), which begat Yahoo! (1995) and eBay (1995), which begat Google (1998) and PayPal (1998), which begat YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and LinkedIn (2003) which begat Twitter (2006) and Zynga (2007), which begat Square (2010), Dropbox (2008), and many more.

If I left out important foundational companies of this mental model, please forgive me. That was not meant to be a comprehensive history. It was meant to illustrate how this evolutionary scenario plays out over time.

If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don't make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don't need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That's how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.

If you look at that history of silicon valley, you see that in the forty year history (since Intel's formation), there have been close to ten cycles of maturation and new company formation, and those cycles are getting shorter and the number of important foundational companies that are formed each cycle are increasing.

That makes total sense since this darwinian evolutionary model is non linear. One company begets two and those two companies beget four, and so on and so forth. Of course there are exogenous factors that also play out, like technology changes, financial market cycles, and the availability and cost of talent, and they impact how fast the startup hub economy expands.

This darwinian evolutionary model of startup hub development is not limited to silicon valley. We have seen it play out in other places, most notably Boston, and increasingly in NYC. It is also playing out in markets like Boulder Colorado and Austin Texas and many other parts of the US and many parts of the world.

When I look at a startup hub, I like to figure out what the "Fairchild Semiconductor" of that market was and when it got started. That tells me how far along the development cycle that startup hub is. In NYC, that was Doubleclick which was founded in 1996, the same year as my first venture capital firm, Flatiron Partners, which was founded on two premises, that the Internet would be big and that NYC would be an important locus of Internet innovation. We did not invest in Doubleclick (sadly) but we did invest in a lot of interesting Internet companies in NYC in the late 90s.

So NYC's startub ecosystem is 16 years old now. And we are two cycles in. The companies that are getting started and funded right now in NYC are akin to the Apple/Oracle stage of silicon valley. If you want to push, you could suggest that we are three cycles in now and the companies that are getting funded right now are akin to the Sun/Silicon Graphics/Cisco era. That might be right.

But in any case, NYC's tech sector is not anywhere close in terms of fertility to silicon valley. It will be there in another 25 to 30 years. And silicon valley will be even further along. 

Unless, of course, something else happens.

The technological revolution that preceded the digital revolution was autos and airplanes. They were invented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the first commercial startups emerged in the first decade of the 20th century.  The auto/airplane revolution played out until the 1960s/1970s. That suggests that a technology revolution lasts around 75 years.

The transistor was invented in the late 1940s and by 1958 we had commercial startups working on the technology. So if this revolution is anything like the last, the next big thing will be invented any day now and within a decade or two we will be on to the next technology revolution.

And in that case, all bets are off. Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit and who knows what will be the next Silicon Valley.

But of course, all of this is conjecture. History doesn't repeat itself. But it does rhyme. That comes from Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain). One of my favorite people ever.

A few weeks ago, Twitter released a new # Discover tab on its web app. I do not believe the feature has made its way into the android app yet. At least I don't think I have it in my android app.

But I really like the new # Discover tab. It has immediately caused Twitter Discover to join Hacker News and Techmeme as my first reads every morning.

What's great about Twitter Discover is that I get links I don't get on Techmeme and Hacker News. I see things about sports, NYC, music, and other things that the people I follow on Twitter care about that have nothing to do with tech, venture capital, and startups.

Twitter Discover had been, until recently, the same links for everyone, or at least the same links by geography. I am not entirely sure to be honest. But now Twitter Discover is personalized for every Twitter user. And, like Who To Follow which got yet another upgrade yesterday, Twitter Discover will continue to evolve and improve as Twitter adds more data science, more data, and more user feedback into its development.

I've been in London all week.

When I arrived at Heathrow I bought a data only SIM in the vending machine in baggage claim.

My friend Simon suggested I set up a new Skype account and get a UK SkypeIn number.

I did that and I have been operating without a voice connection. I use skype for voice, Kik for text, and evrrything else works just fine on data.

It's a pretty sweet lifehack. Give it a try the next time you are on the road out of your home country.

With all the talk of massive amounts of cash sloshing around the web/mobile startup ecosystem (including things I've said recently), you would think that nobody bootstraps anymore. But that is not true at all.

Last week my partner Albert blogged about our most recent investment in Behance. Behance was bootstrapped for its first five years. As Scott Belsky, Behance's founder and CEO, wrote on the Behance blog:

For the past five years, Behance has been a bootstrapped enterprise. We’ve sold Action Pads, books, job postings, conference tickets, and even banner ads (horror!) to generate the income to build Behance. It’s been amazing, and we’ve developed as a team and company in extraordinary ways.

Behance isn't the only recent USV portfolio company to bootstrap its way into our portfolio. Wattpad launched in 2006 and bootstrapped for five years before we invested.

Gabe at DuckDuckGo launched in the fall of 2008, and bootstrapped for three years, working by himself to build DDG, before we invested.

Stack Overflow also launched in the fall of 2008. Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, and the Stack team worked on the project without outside funding for several years before USV invested.

Dwolla launched in the 2010 and operated in bootstrap mode for eighteen months before we invested earlier this year.

Three of the six portfolio companies in our new fund, raised late last year, were bootstrapped for an average of 3 1/2 years before we invested. And at least half of the most recent twenty investments we have made were bootstrapped for well more than a year, and often for a lot longer, before we made our initital investment.

None of this is to suggest that going the accelerator, seed, angel, or some other more fashionable route is a bad idea. They all work just fine. And we are investing in plenty of companies that choose that route. But for some reason our firm is drawn to the bootstrapped model, and increasingly so.

One of the most exciting areas of Internet applications these days are applications that are "mobile native". That doesn't just mean mobile first. It means mobile native - the app could not exist if the mobile smartphone didn't exist.

A great example of this is the "book a cab ride on your phone" category. The leader in this category is Uber which does a great job and really nailed the experience. I've also used SideCar in San Francisco and Hailo in London. All three are great experiences.

These services work so well because the cab driver and the passenger both have mobile phones that are geolocated. The application matches up driver and passenger in real time and handles payment as well. That's a killer experience.

When thinking about new mobile app categories, we like to think about these mobile native services. They are very powerful.

Based on the feedback I got on this topic last week, I've revised the title of the series and the topics we are going to cover.

The series will be called People. Human Capital is a turnoff. Businesses are all about people. And people aren't capital.

I've added posts on retention and asking someone to leave the company.

So here is the schedule of posts:

- The importance of culture and fit when hiring

- Where to find strong talent

- Optimal headcount at various stages

- Best hiring practices

- Retention

- Asking somone to leave your company

- How to leverage your partners (including your investors) in building and managing a team.

We also have lined up guest posts from Donna White, Dr Dana, Angela Baldonero, Susan Loh, and Chad Dickerson.

Should be a great series. I am looking forward to writing and reading it. It will go on for the next three months.

I just read that a lot of the social news reader traffic publishers like Washington Post and The Guardian were getting from Facebook has dropped off dramatically.

Next we will read that the traffic social video apps get from Facebook has dropped dramatically.

All of this reminds me of the big drop in traffic SEO driven sites deal with every time Google does an algorithm change.

SEO and Facebook timeline integration is "best practice" on the Internet. You should do both. They can be great free acquisition channels. But they are not great retention channels. Because easy come easy go.

Be your own bitch.

I was going through the board deck of our portfolio company Wattpad this morning. Wattpad is the leading writing/reading community on the web and mobile. Quantcast says over 7.5mm people visit their website each month. And Wattpad is one of the top free "Books" apps in both the iOS an Android apps stores.

Wattpad has a very large mobile user base around the world as a result of the sucess of its mobile apps. And so this slide on geographic distribution of its user base caught my attention:

The iOS user base for Wattpad is about 65% in North America. But Wattpad's Android user base is less than 50% in North America.

More notably is what is going on in Asia and Europe. 24% of Wattpad's Android users are in Asia versus 12% of their iOS users. And 19% of their Android users are in Europe vs 13% of their iOS users.

Some of this data may be representative of Wattpad's user base. Everything on Wattpad is free. Wattpad makes writing and reading books feel like writing and reading blogs. And Wattpad is big in places like Vietnam, Phillipines, and New Zealand. But it is also quite popular in the US, Spain, and the UK. It is a global reading and writing community.

In any case, it was quite interesting to me that in Wattpad's user base, the North American users skew toward iOS but the Asian and European users skew towards Android. I plan to look at more data from our portfolio on this. Could be a trend here that would be useful to understand.

The idea for this post came in the comments at some point in the past week. I can't actually recall how we got to talking about the artist named Fred Wilson, but we did. And I said I was going to tell the story of how I met Fred. So I will do that. It's a fun story. And then I will post some of my favorites of his work. And then we can talk about Fred. Because he's a great artist and a super nice person too.

When Google came along I, like many peoople, started googling my own name. Slowly but surely the links on that result jelled along the lines of two primary people - me and the artist named Fred Wilson. Around that time, about ten years ago, Fred was selected to represent the US at the 50th Venice Biennale. That was a big moment for Fred and his name started appearing all over the palce. And that is when I became familiar with the memorable look of Fred.

So fast forward to a few years ago. I was walking down Broadway near the USV offices and I see Fred walking up Broadway on the same side of the street as I'm on. So I stopped and waited for Fred to reach me. When he did, I reached out and said "are you Fred Wilson?", he said "yes, I am", and then I said "I am the other Fred Wilson". He looked at me and smiled. We had a short conversation and that was that. Since then I've met Fred a few times at art events and such and most recently the Gotham Gal, our son, and I met him at his recent show at the Pace Gallery.

Fred is an installation artist who focuses on the issues of social justice, cultural norms, and racism. He uses objects found in museums as the basis for his artistic exploration. Here are some of my favorites of his work:

This work is called Guarded View and has been on display at the Whitney in NYC recently. It hits you as you walk out of the elevator on the fourth or fifth floor. It was inspired by Fred's time as a museum guard. It speaks to how security guards become part of the scenery in museums and other parts of our world.

Speak of Me as I Am is a work from Fred's exhibition a the Venice Biennale. This work was inspired by Shakespeare's Othello and Fred's time in Venice working with glassblowers. Fred's chandeliers, and he has made many varieties, are incredible.

Fred does these amazing black venetian glass mirrors. I have seen a number of varieties of them. This one is called Mark and was made in 2009. The Gotham Gal and I own one.

So that's a quick overview of Fred Wilson, how I met him, and a sampling of his work. If you want to see more, Fred is represented by The Pace Gallery in NYC, Rena Bransten in San Francisco. I have also seen his work at mitterand + sanz in Zurich and JGM. Galerie in Paris. And of course, his work is in many of the modern art museums around the world.