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Introducing The Slow Hunch Podcast, and Episode 1 with Fraser Kelton
Nick Grossman – Jun 5, 2024
Today I'm excited to introduce two things: 1/ I'm starting a podcast series along the same theme as this blog. The Slow Hunch Podcast will dive into the twists and turns, ups and downs, near misses, minor miracles, and personal [...] Read more
Farcaster
Nick Grossman – May 21, 2024
Doubling Down on Onchain Publishing with Paragraph
Nick Grossman – May 2, 2024
Today, we're thrilled to announce our investment in Paragraph, the leading platform enabling onchain publishing. Paragraph is joining forces with our portfolio company Mirror, which first defined many of today’s onchain publishing primitives. View the full post on Paragraph. Read more
Our Investment in Anon
Nick Grossman – Apr 29, 2024
In the original designs for the World Wide Web, there was a clear line drawn between the services people interacted with (websites), and the software they used to access those websites (browsers). An important distinction was that while the websites [...] Read more
The Primitives Protocol
Nick Grossman – Apr 4, 2024
For over a decade now, USV has been eagerly anticipating the emergence of “Web3” alongside “crypto”. What we mean by this is that while blockchains and crypto assets are still viewed by the world at large as financial technologies, they [...] Read more
Investing at the Edge of Large Markets Under Transformative Pressure
Nick Grossman – Jan 23, 2024
Union Square Ventures turns 20 this year. Brad and Fred began to deploy the first USV fund in 2004. The dot com bubble had recently popped, modern smartphones hadn’t been invented, “social media” wasn’t a thing, and the first bitcoin [...] Read more
You Never Know When You’ve Had a Bad Day
Many years ago, when I had just started working at USV, I remember there was kind of a complicated situation that unfolded in a seemingly bad way, and I'll never forget what Brad said in response. He said: Read more
AI + Crypto: Best and Worst Cases
Nick Grossman – Jun 28, 2023
I think of AI and crypto as two very different, but very much related, elements of society moving from the industrial age to the digital age. At USV, we (along with lots of others over the years) have used the [...] Read more
Motivating via Excitement vs. Fear
Nick Grossman – Jun 25, 2023
My favorite song from the past two years was Chris Stapleton’s Starting Over , the second verse of which goes like this: This might not be an easy time There’s rivers to cross and hills to climb Some days we [...] Read more