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Fun Friday: Upside Pizza Club

This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition. This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird [...]  Read more

AI Art

There has been a lot of discussion about how AIs can make art and possibly replace artists, but I think the opposite is more likely to happen. Artists have been using AI to make art for a while now and [...]  Read more

AIVC

I was approached by a company this week that has trained a large language model on all of the blog posts I have written here at AVC. There are 9059 of them for those that are counting. They wanted to [...]  Read more

The Annual Computer Science Fair

Ten years ago, a small group of folks in the K12 Computer Science Education community in NYC decided to put on a “mock job fair” for high school students who were taking computer science classes in the NYC public schools. [...]  Read more

Etsy Lens

I am the Chair of the Etsy Board and have been an investor and board member at Etsy since the mid-2000s. It is a company that I love and get great joy from being part of. Last year Etsy quietly [...]  Read more

What Is A Protocol And Why Does It Matter?

USV’s current thesis is: Enabling trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols. https://www.usv.com/#thesis-3-0 That last word is powerful but unfortunately less understood than the other words in that sentence. Protocols have [...]  Read more

Noya

Six months ago, I wrote about Direct Air Carbon Capture and ended with this: I remember hearing that “we’ve spent hundreds of years taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into our atmosphere and we are going to [...]  Read more

Noya

USV's climate thesis is to "invest in companies and projects that provide mitigation for or adaptation to the climate crisis." When it comes to mitigation, we believe that capturing carbon and sequestering it is a critical effort. Someone once told [...]  Read more