Writing

One of the most challenging situations in startup/venture capital land is the broken syndicate. It is not a topic that is talked about much, but it is fairly common, particularly for companies that succeed in building a business but falter [...]  Read more

I just watched Vitalik Buterin’s keynote at Devcon 4 in Prague last week, on Halloween and on the tenth anniversary of Satoshi’s whitepaper. In this keynote, Vitalik explains what has taken so long in getting from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum [...]  Read more

Back in March of this year, I wrote a post on the USV blog announcing our investment in Cryptokitties . A lot has happened since then. The company that made Cryptokitties is now called Dapper and it has raised a [...]  Read more

One of the big trends in startup land over the last decade is consumer brands getting built direct to consumer (D2C) on highly efficient advertising channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In these online channels, brands can test, [...]  Read more

The Partnership For New York City operates some excellent “vertical” accelerators for companies that are getting started and are focused on serving industries with big footprints here in NYC. Financial Services – FinTech Innovation Lab Health Care – Digital Health [...]  Read more

The massacre in Pittsburgh is heartbreaking and awful, and another example of the extent to which society seems to be fraying. The Pittsburgh attacker spent a lot of time on social media sites that stoked his fear, isolation and anger.  [...]  Read more

Consumer surplus is the delta between what consumers expect to pay or are willing to pay for an item and what they actually have to pay given market dynamics. A good example of where we are generating a lot of [...]  Read more