Obliterate, Don’t Automate

In 2015, my partner Fred Wilson published a short blog post, Don’t Automate, Obliterate, on how USV thinks about startup investments. The post was based on a 1990 HBR article by Michael Hammer by the same name. Specifically, Fred and the rest of USV partners found that the best investments were in the companies that were not just building software to automate existing markets… but to fully obliterate them instead. Since then, it’s become a defining characteristic for how USV assesses startup …