Bidding Goodbye to Andrew

Four years ago this summer, Andrew Parker joined Union Square Ventures. Brad wrote this post welcoming Andrew to our firm and explaining how we found him through his blog and ours.

And today I get the task of announcing that Andrew is leaving our firm. Somehow Brad got the easier part of telling this story.

Ever since we started Union Square Ventures almost seven years ago, we’ve envisioned it as a partner driven firm where the partners do most of the work. We don’t have a career path for young people, and we emphasize that with a two year and out analyst program.

Andrew tested that assumption. He taught himself all the things we didn’t have the time or inclination to teach him. He got our investment theses quickly and he can recite them better than we can. He would remind us of them during our weekly team meetings and regularly brought us back to earth when we were starry eyed over something. He identified emerging startups like HeyZap and Foursquare before we did.

And so we started to think that maybe there was an exception to every rule. But we won’t get the chance to find out if Andrew Parker will make a great VC at Union Square Ventures. Because he and his fiance Lisa are moving to Boston to start their new life where Lisa is doing her residency. If there is one thing even more important to us than our “partner only” mantra, it’s all of us working out of one office and putting our families first.

So Andrew Parker is off to Boston. And we expect that he will indeed make a great VC. Just not at Union Square Ventures. It’s our loss but a big gain to the world of startups, entrepreneurs, and venture capital, particularly those living in Boston.

We will indeed be replacing Andrew but we aren’t yet sure how. We’ll wrap our heads around that and report back shortly. I suspect we will once again post a job description on this blog and ask for a comment and a link to a web presence. That’s how we found Andrew four years ago. That worked out well for both us and Andrew, and we are all wiser for the experience.