Web3 Compensation and Hiring
This post was co-written with Tom Dils and Calder Zwerling. A version of the post also appears on the Variant website Earlier this year, Variant and USV conducted an extensive web3 compensation survey of our portfolio companies. Our goals were [...] Read more
Making Energy Programmable
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
Open Source, the AI stack, and need for permissionless experimentation
An obvious observation: open-source software has been an integral part of software development for decades. This collaborative approach enables developers across the world to work together on projects in a decentralized manner. Making source code freely available for anyone to [...] Read more
Paying attention to the climate crisis
In March of this year, the IPCC reported that global surface temperature for the years 2011-2020 had reached an average of 1.1°C higher than pre-industrial levels. This unequivocally came as a result of human activity, principally through the emission of [...] Read more
Chamber
Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Chamber, a new service for securely holding digital assets. One of the challenges for crypto adoption is the perception that it is unsafe. Research by Pew found “75% of Americans who have [...] Read more
Daybreak’s Series B
Over the last several years, USV has built out both our thesis and portfolio around tackling the mental health crisis. Our investments have broadly broken down into three groups: Broadening access to care by making it easier to find, receive, [...] Read more