Visualizing our Investments
Union Square Ventures is a thesis driven firm. We don't really invest in the consumer web, networks, mobile, the cloud, or any specific technology. We invest in the disruption of the global economy caused by the increasing liquidity of information [...] Read more
Feature Friday: Guest Checkout with Dwolla
When Union Square Ventures invested in Dwolla we were excited about the team’s approach to payments. But there was a big limitation which made initial use of Dwolla a bit daunting: you had to have a funded Dwolla account which [...] Read more
Movie Mini Reviews: Looper, Skyfall, Lincoln, Life of Pi
I have been too busy with more important topics to write movie reviews. So here are a few mini reviews (reviewlets?) of movies I have seen recently. I wanted to like both Looper and Skyfall but didn’t really. Conversely, my [...] Read more
MBA Mondays: The Revenue Model Hackpad, Take Two
So I messed up bigtime yesterday. I created a "final version" of the revenue model hackpad and locked it down so hard that nobody could even see it. What happened is I am using a product, hackpad, that I don't [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: Programming (Interim Review)
I started the Tech Tuesday series on programming in April of this year with an overview post that compared programming to telling a person how to do something. At the time, I presented nine different questions that this raises, such [...] Read more
Sign Up for My Skillshare Class on Probability
It was great fun to see XKCD take up the subject of Bayesian probability. That was a good reminder that it’s been a while since I taught my Skillshare class on the subject. And so I have added a new [...] Read more
Thinking About Employment (Part 3)
This is the third post in my mini series on employment. Part 1 illustrated how agriculture and manufacturing, the two historically large areas of employment, have collapsed over time. Part 2 drilled into the services sector which today accounts for [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: Algorithms (Wrap Up)
Today’s Tech Tuesday post will wrap up the algorithms mini-series. Last Tuesday I presented implementations of the same algorithm in five different languages. I had mentioned in an earlier post that the particular problem we are solving – seeing if [...] Read more
Learning to Program, Programming to Learn
One of the reasons that we decided to move to Chelsea was the proximity to the USV office. The other was that our kids can walk to Avenues, a new private school with an ambitious program of building campuses in [...] Read more