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Matt Mandel – Mar 20, 2024
Existing electrical infrastructure is ill-suited to our current needs. It was developed for a world where we simply sent firm AC power from centralized power plants to end-customers. Today, however, electricity flows multi-directionally, as both AC and DC, and more [...] Read more
Vertically Integrated and AI-First
Matt Mandel – Feb 22, 2024
Co-authored with Jared Hecht A new pattern is emerging that we are excited about at USV: entrepreneurs are upgrading physical industries with an AI-first and vertically integrated approach. Instead of selling software to industry incumbents, startups are increasingly deciding to [...] Read more
AI Aesthetics
Matt Mandel – Feb 1, 2024
The word “technology” comes from the Greek word techne, which refers to an art or skill or practice. Plato writes a lot about the concept, often making reference to artists such as flute players as canonical examples of those engaged [...] Read more
Making Energy Programmable
Matt Mandel – Dec 13, 2023
We’ve previously written about the storage gap. The proliferation of solar has led to an abundance of energy when the sun is out and a dearth when it’s not. Batteries help address this gap by storing excess energy in times [...] Read more
Mind the Storage Gap
Matt Mandel – Jul 31, 2023
Co-authored with Mark Khalil Deployment of renewables has been accelerating globally. In 2022, around 12% of electricity came from wind and solar, compared to less than 3% a decade ago. These resources offer access to low-cost clean energy – but [...] Read more
AI Reliability and Building Trusted Brands
Matt Mandel – May 10, 2023
tl;dr: For increasingly capable AIs to gain widespread adoption, they will have to earn our trust by reliably doing what we want in the ways we want. Four promising areas for ensuring reliability and corrigibility in AI products are: refining [...] Read more
Joining USV – Matt
Matt Mandel – Mar 2, 2023
I’m thrilled to be starting at USV as an analyst on our investment team. I’m joining USV from AeroFarms, a startup building vertical farms around the world. During my time there, I wore a bunch of different hats, ranging from [...] Read more