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NFTs Have Evolved, NFTs Endure
Nikhil Raman – Jan 3, 2024
USV started playing with NFTs in 2017. First when Rare Pepes were starting to gain some niche popularity and then again when cryptokitties launched. Shortly after that exploration, we invested in the team behind cryptokitties and wrote: We think digital [...] Read more
Web3 Compensation and Hiring
Matt Cynamon – Dec 21, 2023
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
Matt Mandel – Dec 13, 2023
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
Andy Weissman – Oct 15, 2023
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
Grace Carney – Oct 3, 2023
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
Albert Wenger – Sep 18, 2023
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