USV Blog

While I'm sure that there's a lot of truth in this (and love the petition, as it focuses on shareholders, not the employees), the margins Coinbase was having for trading cryptocurrencies was unsustainable, and the company was overvalued. Now the controversial part: Coinbase had a valuation of 100k BTC in 2012, and had the same valuation (100k BTC) at the IPO time. Unlike the internet where most of the valuecis captured over IP protocol, with Bitcoin I expect the base layer to capture most of the value, and not the companies on top of it. https://www.usv.com/writing/2016/08/fat-protocols/

I like the simplicity of their website: https://www.usv.com single sentence thesis explanations with a list of investments.

I also didn’t understand this. I had a lot of respect for AH and USV. In particular I know some of the folks at USV. But some of their decisions astound me. When they invested in Crypto Kitties and Fred posted about it, I felt they jumped the shark. I remember how $31M was poured into a startup called Color a few years back, only for the startup to go belly up a month later. Meanwhile they don’t even take a meeting with something far more promising, sometimes. I feel I will never understand the VC mindset. For what it’s worth, here are their perfunctory rationales: https://versionone.vc/announcing-our-investment-in-cryptokitties-the-w… http://www.usv.com/blog/cryptokitties-1

USV has invested in CryptoKitties (https://www.usv.com/blog/cryptokitties-1). This doesn't invalidate his position, but it's worth remembering he is not an objective observer in the situation; his company is positioned to directly gain from a crypto-mania.

Not only is there a chicken-and-egg effect in creating a successful Hacker News spinoff, but looking at the sample content on Venture News, it seems that all the content on VN is redundant with content that generally hits the Top 5 on Hacker News. (Are people who use FundersClub and Hacker News different demographics?) Compare with the launch of http://www.usv.com which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners, with a low volume of posts in general.

On the startup side I'm often finding more things that are interesting to me on the community side of http://www.usv.com/

Parallel Markets | Sr Frontend Engineer | Remote | Full Time | https://parallelmarkets.com Parallel Markets provides a re-usable identity for financial institutions in both web2 and web3 contexts. We just raised our Series A from Union Square Ventures (https://www.usv.com/writing/2022/02/parallel-markets/), and we're growing our remote-first team with additional full-time/permanent hires. Our frontend is React/GraphQL/Relay. Our backend is Elixir/Phoenix — with a dash of Go and NodeJS — on PostgreSQL. We deploy on AWS, provisioned through Terraform. Engineers here at Parallel love building products, emphasizing efficiency and developer happiness. We deploy at-will, many times a day, coordinated via Slack, GitHub, and Shortcut. As a remote-first team, we will always prefer asynchronous processes. As a result, our morning standup is the only recurring meeting and we Write Things Down™. That goes for requirements and documentation, but also our company handbook (https://about.parallelmarkets.com/handbook). Through collaboration, we prioritize the best answer — regardless who comes up with it — and believe "done" is better than "perfect." We want to work with curious, self-motivated engineers who enjoy learning new technologies. We all learned Elixir on the job, for instance. So, instead of looking for people with "X years doing Y," we're glad to find those with opinions on a variety of languages and approaches. We're excited to know there's always more to learn; if you feel…

Web platforms are governments. "Facebook is a government. Facebook's users are citizens, and Facebook's applications developers are the private companies that drive much of the economy. Apple. Twitter, Myspace, Craigslist, Foursquare, Tumblr and every other large network of engaged users (including some services of Google) plays a similar role. We have always tacitly acknowledged this. We talk about these networks as communities, communities have governments." "Once you start thinking about large web platforms as governments, the logical question is what kind of government are they. One thing is for sure - none of these platforms are democracies. They are oligarchies controlled by founders, investors or shareholders. That may not be at all bad. As long as citizens (users) can move freely from one government to another with little switching cost, there is no reason to burden these polities with the inherent inefficiencies of popular democracy. But that does put a special premium on emigration policies and property rights. Do I own my data, can I export it freely? It also suggests that large networks that have strong network effects may someday need other incentives to act in the best interests of their citizens." http://www.usv.com/blog/web-services-as-governments

Creator / submitter here - Some people have called StreetEYE 'HN for investors', but it's a little different. You can go to Bloomberg, Reuters, WSJ, FT and hit a page with the most-read stories, but now everyone shares everything on social networks and blogs, so we can try to make one page with the most popular news across all sites and blogs - find the top people who share news, and combine algorithmic, professional, and crowdsourced curation to make the best front page across financial media. StreetEYE is more like a mashup of HN, Techmeme, Google News, Flipboard, Buzzfeed. Basically the goal is to make the best flippin' front page of the financial Intertubes, by all means necessary. For now, no comments or submissions to avoid spam, but plan to add them. A longer manifesto here - http://blog.streeteye.com/blog/2013/10/the-streeteye-manifesto/ Been around for a couple of years in various iterations, has a bit of traction among financial journos/twitterati. Never submitted before because the typical HN reader is not the target, but did an October relaunch, and there was a lot of interest in this thread where it was mentioned - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6844565 Other sites in similar space http://boredbanker.com http://filll.com http://www.realclearmarkets.com/ http://www.businessinsider.com/clusterstock/thehive http://www.usv.com for VC (of course) http://www.trejdify.com for broader business news Would love to hear feedback, suggestions, any…

I loved their 404 page - http://www.usv.com/404

> And that is a good thing. I'm not sure I agree. Of course, Fred has invested in Carta, and he wants to push Carta X. But a stake in a company is absolutely different than a fungible sport ticket. He should know, as he has also invested in non-fungible tokens in the Blockchain (cryptokitties). [0] Startup equity is not exactly fungible. Plus, startup equity is an incentive for founders and early employees to work hard and smart to make their company successful. Giving that incentive away too soon might reduce the chance for the company to become a big hit one day. [0]: https://www.usv.com/writing/2018/03/cryptokitties-2/

Union Square Ventures invested in them a few years back, and blogged about their rationale and some info on where Tucows is/has been headed as a business: https://www.usv.com/writing/2017/02/tucows/

A possible remedy to this might be the emergence of “fat protocols” http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols

> when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so Surprised no one else has pointed this out, but that was one of the original problems that Disqus was trying to solve. E.g.: https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus

Also lost to history is 10gen's original intent of being more of a complete platform, with Mongo just being the storage layer. Business Insider ran on that platform. Some details in https://www.usv.com/blog/10gen (A friend of mine was VP Eng there and was trying to recruit me to work on the larger platform, but as Mongo started gaining traction they dropped the other parts to focus on that)

Most comments here are quite pessimistic. Matrix.org is a start. On a much much broader scale the Web 3.0 will be build on Blockchains, the so called Fat protocols will surpass the Web 2.0 or eventually merge. https://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols Ethereum will build up a considerable part of the ecosystem, with Dapps like status.im https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Je7yErjEVt4

Hi Larry, I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times. You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap. If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested: https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/ https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crowdfunding/ http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols

> In tech, many investors’ first question for entrepreneurs > is “what’s your exit strategy?” "When we made the investment, it was decided that we'd keep it quiet for a while." [1] [1] https://www.usv.com/blog/kickstarter Also interesting: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/union-square-ventures/exits

We are absolutely not using terms like "police-free". Others have labelled us as such. We view this as an agnostic protocol that people can use to trade goods and services online with each other, with no fees, and it's coupled with a marketplace that no one centrally controls. It's not Silk Road 3.0, it's ecommerce 2.0. For more information on what investors are thinking, reach USV's Brad Burnham discussing why they invested in us: https://www.usv.com/post/5579998c8711930003901f5f/introducing-ob1

Some actual numbers from Fred Wilson are here: http://www.usv.com/posts/why-early-stage-venture-investments-fail He makes the interesting point that 2/3rds of his successful investments made major changes along the way.

through senate staffers i know, i made sure Senator Manchin sees my post and also my partner's post http://www.usv.com/posts/when-did-america-become-to-afraid-to-explore-…

Chris, are you looking into non-currency uses for BTC, a la Albert Wenger [0]? My own feeling is that the protocol (secure ledger) is more generally valuable and can likely be put to work in a lot of uses. Is that your feeling as well or are you primarily excited in its use as cash? [0] http://www.usv.com/posts/bitcoin-as-protocol

Is NOW open source? http://www.usv.com/posts/usvcom-is-now-open-source

USV.com post about this HN post: http://www.usv.com/posts/union-square-ventures-new-website-is-an-hn-cl…

According to USV's blog, there were other investors in the first round: John Borthwick, Fred Seibert, and Jakob Lodwick No mention of what they got. http://www.usv.com/2007/10/tumblr.php

NYC - Hailo We've got many jobs open for our NYC offices, and we've just raised a new round of funding from USV: http://www.usv.com/2013/02/hailo.php The positions we're looking to hire for ASAP are our Mobile QA Team Lead, Testing Specialist, and Systems Administrator. Please apply here: http://jobs.hailocab.com/

Which ones? (I'm one of the dudes who made it.) Everything that's on the USV "Investments page" should be on the timeline. http://www.usv.com/investments/ There are a few cases in which companies pivoted, so we just listed the new thing (i.e. Hashable to YieldMo)

Fred Wilson's specialty is with larger consumer/enterprise investments (http://www.usv.com/investments/) vs Dave McClure's speciality is in smaller investments and also international. According to Dave, it seems like there's so slowing of momentum for growth with the smaller (base hits) he sees both domestically and internationally. And I appreciate his blog post that champions the consumer web. But I wonder with Fred's observations if people might need to be a bit more wise with consumer internet plays if raising funds might be more difficult than previously. I also wonder when you combine both Fred and Dave's observations that maybe you see an opportunity for bootstrapped ventures to start out a lot smaller, maybe even w/o outside funds.

I agree with this post to some extent however, I still believe that there is a lot of space on the "web" especially in the likes of ecommerce, education, small/medium enterprises, advertising & of course International which has opportunities in all of those sectors as well as others. However, looking at USV's latest investments[1], posts as well as Fred's posts especially this one, it is appears they prefer enterprise startups[2] BUT they are still interested in consumer startups as long as they have a transactional or high intent ad business model. [1] Pollenware, DuoLingo, DuckDuckGo, Dwolla, Funding Circle etc [2] http://www.usv.com/2012/08/networks-and-the-enterprise.php